Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Biden economy kicks in, China behaves badly (again), and rock stars are fed up with woke. Let’s lead off with this weird photo people have been taking about all week:
How did you make the Carters look like tiny puppets?
Puppet people aside, what better image for the week in which Biden seems to be bringing stagflation back?
If you were wondering when the Trump boom would end and the Biden bust begin, it just did:
U.S. job growth for the month of April fell far below what experts had predicted, as data reported Friday showed an increase of 266,000 jobs, versus an estimate of 1 million — the largest miss relative to expectations since at least 1998.
Economists had suggested a positive outlook for the report, with the White House hoping for a gain of at least 700,000 jobs — making Joe Biden the first president ever to hit 2 million new jobs in his first 100 days. But expectations came crashing back to reality with data showing an overestimation of nearly 800,000 — the worst miss in decades.
The U.S. unemployment rate rose slightly from 6.0 percent to 6.1. March’s payroll gains were also revised downward by nearly 150,000 jobs, from an initial print of 916,000 to 770,000. Labor force participation rate rose slightly, to 61.7 percent.
Huh, irresponsible tax-and-spend policies, rampant inflation and paying people not to work evidently aren’t a recipe for economic success. Who knew?
Speaking of inflation, it looks like it’s back, baby! Rising metal, oil, and ag commodity prices all point to inflation. “Wood prices are at an all-time high at over $1,370 per 1,000 board feet.”
Biden Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm owns stock in “Proterra, an electric vehicle company that is being actively promoted by the Biden administration. Further, Granholm being the Secretary of Energy means she gets to make regulations that can directly enrich herself.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Joe Biden said today, “Most people don’t know: you walk into a store and you buy a gun, but you go to a gun show you can buy whatever you want and no background check.”
This isn’t even close to being true. In fact, gun shows are subject to the same rules as apply everywhere else, which are that:
commercial transfers require federal background checks, but that
private transfers only require federal background checks if they are conducted within one of the thirteen states that superintend non-commercial firearms transactions
There are no special rules for gun shows. The same set of laws applies to them as applies to, say, your kitchen table: If you are in the business of selling guns, you are federally obliged to run a check. If you are not, you are not — unless your state requires you to. That’s it. There’s no “loophole” here, and nothing about gun shows that separates them from the broader debate about private sales.
A new poll from ABC and the Washington Post published on Wednesday found a significant drop in support for new gun-control laws, especially among young people.
The number of Americans supporting enacting new gun laws over protecting gun rights fell from 57 percent to 50 percent, a seven-point drop from when the poll was last conducted in 2018. The number of Americans favoring gun rights jumped from 34 to 43 percent, a nine-point jump. The difference between the two positions narrowed by 16 points overall.
The sharpest decline in support for new gun-control measures came among 18 to 29-year-olds and Hispanics. Both groups saw a 20 percent drop. Rural Americans and strong conservatives saw a 17-point drop.
Worker shortage is so acute that a Tampa MacDonald’s is paying people $50 just to interview for a job. “Some 17 million Americans remain on jobless benefits. Perhaps many of these people want jobs but are getting paid more to sit on the couch.”
How Michael Dell used several financial maneuvers to turn $3.6 billion into more than $50 billion.
The Who’s frontman Roger Daltry says that the woke are ruining the world. “It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere.”
And Daltry wasn’t the only rock star calling BS on the woke. Also taking aim: punk rock icon John Lydon:
Johnny Rotten blames ‘wokeness’ for US ‘collapse’
Sex Pistols’ frontman Johnny Lydon had some rotten things to say about “wokeness.”
In a recent profile with the Times UK, the aging punk rocker decried “cancel culture” and the activists who campaigned to tear down national monuments which they say promote historical racism. The statues include that of Winston Churchill, one of the UK’s most revered prime ministers.
He also blamed academia as well as the media for giving “the space” to “tempestuous spoilt children.”…
Addressing calls to tear down Churchill’s statue in London, Lydon dismissed criticism that the wartime prime minister was racist. However, critics point out that the leader once referred to Indians as “the beastliest people in the world next to Germans,” and thought that black people are “[not] as capable or as efficient as white people.”
“This man saved Britain,” Lydon asserted. “Whatever he got up to in South Africa or India beforehand is utterly irrelevant to the major issue in hand.”
If there are any bigger haters in history than today’s cancel culture, Lydon conceded, it’s the Nazis — and Churchill took care of that.
Florida “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones is a big fat liar. “NPR describes Jones as a ‘top scientist’ leading Florida’s pandemic response. In fact, Jones has held three jobs in her field; all three have ended in her being terminated and criminally charged.”
Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.
Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.
Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.
It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.
In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it. I learned a lot of lessons from my time in the ring: self-reliance, how to overcome fear, the importance of agility, the basics of military field dressing. And, given the turnover, I also learned how to make new friends.
Sad news (and possibly foul play). “University of Texas linebacker Jake Ehlinger, the younger brother of former Longhorns quarterback Sam Ehlinger, was found dead Thursday.”
In a rebuke over a year in the making, the Texas House of Representatives gave initial approval to a statewide ban on homeless camping — aimed tacitly, if not directly, at the City of Austin’s near-two-year experiment in public camping.
House Bill (HB) 1925 by Rep. Giovanni Capriglione (R-Southlake) passed on second reading by a vote of 85 to 56 on Wednesday. Eight Democratic members voted with Republicans in support of the bill. They were Reps. Rafael Anchía (D-Dallas), Ryan Guillen (D-Rio Grande City), Abel Herrero (D-Robstown), Tracy King (D-Uvalde), Eddie Lucio (D-Brownsville), Terry Meza (D-Irving), Richard Peña Raymond (D-Laredo), and John Turner (D-Dallas).
Interesting that such a significant number of Hispanic Democrats back the ban.
“I want to be clear,” Capriglione said while laying out his bill, “this bill does not criminalize homelessness.”
Rep. Vikki Goodwin (D-Austin) stated in opposition, “I hate the homeless problem in Austin, but this bill does nothing to solve the root problem.”
The legislation revokes grant funding for any city that violates its provision and tasks the attorney general with seeking injunctive relief against an offending city.
Opponents objected — echoing the city council’s original justification for rescinding the ban in the first place — saying the policy would burden homeless individuals with fines they cannot pay.
An amendment clarifying that recreational camping in public parks and beach access plan campsites are exempt was tacked onto the bill.
However, some of the bill’s opposition was successful with tacking on amendments. One successful amendment was a requirement that officers notify the homeless individual about alternative housing, “if reasonable and appropriate” contact a government official or non-profit organization representative, and provide information on human trafficking.
Others included allowing a homeless individual arrested to secure their personal property and a specific carve-out for camping on the property of a homeless shelter.
Snip.
HB 1925 must pass another House vote before moving to the other chamber. The bill was on the floor last week, but was recommitted to committee after a valid point of order was called.
The equivalent Senate Bill, SB987, still hasn’t passed committee.
No other Texas city has been as pigheadedly stupid as Austin in encouraging vast camps of drug-addicted transients, but with a statewide ban, hopefully no other Texas city will ever have to go through what Austin has the last two years.
Two candidates opposed to teaching critical race theory (CRT) in public school classes have been elected to a Texas school board.
Nine months after Hannah Smith and Cameron “Cam” Bryan introduced a proposal to prevent teaching CRT in the Dallas-area Carroll Independent School District, the pair received nearly 70 percent of the vote in their respective races, winning two seats on the board.
The election came after a 2018 video surfaced showing two students shouting the N-word. The district in response proposed a “Cultural Competency Action Plan,” drawing backlash from parents and the two candidates, who vocally criticized CRT.
Some parents argued during school board meetings that the district’s proposal, which would require diversity and inclusion training, would create “diversity police” and discriminate against white children.
Smith and Bryan won Saturday’s election in landslide, taking two open school board spots.
“The voters have come together in record-breaking numbers to restore unity,” said Smith, a Southlake attorney and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
“By a landslide vote, they don’t want racially divisive critical race theory taught to their children or forced on their teachers. Voters agreed with my positive vision of our community and its future.”
This is good news for turning the tide, but we need parents like this on every school board in the country.
Last week there were two events that I used to pay attention to that this year I ended up ignoring entirely: The Oscars and the NFL Draft. The NFL draft I ignored because of the league’s “getting woke” (though the fact the Texans have been sucking hard makes the decision much easier). The Oscars I have ignored for similar wokeness reasons, plus general disinterest, for a long time, even before the weirdness of 2020.
It seems that I’m not alone, since Oscar ratings were a disaster:
Everyone knew this was coming, given how pathetic the ratings were for the Golden Globes and the Grammys, but even so, the viewership numbers are a shocking disaster for the Academy Awards broadcast. After last year’s rock-bottom viewership hit 23.6 million and the top award went to a Korean film, Parasite, the average person hadn’t even heard of, this year’s Oscars went full woke. You never go full woke . . .
Ratings crashed 58 percent off last year’s abysmal viewership, down to 9.85 million Americans. Let that sink in: In a nation of 330 million, not even ten million Americans watched the Oscars. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ strategy of embracing diversity as a supposed means to bring in younger viewers has proven a complete failure: Ratings were down even more for young adults. In the 18–49 demographic, ratings crashed 64 percent. The star power is gone. The glamour is gone. The public interest is gone.
The Oscars always had problems but in the last decade they’ve become turgid, sanctimonious, predictable, joyless, and boring, not to mention bitter and negative about the country that has created so much splendor and wealth for the lucky few who get to appear onstage at the ceremony. Every year, its top honor goes to a cinematic op-ed destined in most cases to be quickly forgotten rather than an enduring and meaningful piece of entertainment.
The Academy needs to completely rethink the direction it is going in if it wants to salvage any viewership or cultural relevance whatsoever. Like many other institutions, it has mistaken Twitter mobs for the voice of the people and allowed itself to be guided by the former at the expense of heeding the latter.
“Turgid, sanctimonious, predictable, joyless, and boring.” There’s ad headline to put in Variety!
Here’s the video from The Critical Drinker that makes the same points with a bit more pungency, while also noting that many of those working in Hollywood are are absolutely horrible people who have no business lecturing the rest of the country about anything, with a side order of Sullivan’s Travels:
Today I’m doing something I don’t think I’ve ever done before: Take a video I’ve already linked from a LinkSwarm and put it up here, because there are a lot of important lessons to learn.
You should watch all of this:
On April 9, Scott Allen DeShields, Jr. of Kentucky Ballistics was shooting old SLAP rounds through his single-shot Serbu RN 50 when a hot round burst the chamber, shearing the threads off his locking cap and sending pieces of metal flying back at him. Damage included a lacerated jugular, in-tubing a collapsed lung without anesthetic, orbital bone repair and 5 pints of blood.
Him surviving was a combination of being very lucky, having a father with law enforcement training right there to help slow the bleed, and doing exactly the right things to get him alive and conscious to treatment (the ambulance met them halfway, and then had him life-flighted to Vanderbilt Hospital).
Here, Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons discusses the accident, what went wrong (and right) in the aftermath of the Kentucky Ballistics malfunction, and covers in-battery and out-of-battery failure modes for various firearms.
He has some very good advice that goes beyond basic firearms safety. One of the most important is: If something seems “off,” stop and try and figure out what it. The life you save could be your own…
You expect Austin voters to embrace crazy leftwing policies, but turning every grassy median and underpass in the city into a garbage-strewn 24/7 amusement park for drug-addicted transients (with side order of arson and mayhem) was too much even for them, and yesterday they reinstated the camping ban. Proposition B passed 85,830 (57.13%) to 64,409 (42.87%). It’s a grave blow to Austin Mayor Steve Adler, City Councilman Greg Casar, the homeless industrial complex, and a number of random drug dealers.
Other May 1st Voting results:
Proposition F, which would turn Austin in a “strong mayor” form of government (i.e., let Adler control spending more directly instead of a City Manager) was overwhelmingly defeated, 126,847 (85.91%) to 20,810 (14.09%).
Proposition G (adding another city council district) was defeated more narrowly, 83,092 (56.58%) to 62,702 (43.42%).
Proposition H, to give every voter two $25 vouchers to contribute to political campaigns (i.e., another way to pass taxpayer money to leftwing politicians) was defeated 83,092 to 63,809.
All the other propositions passed, including Proposition E (ranked choice voting), which is illegal under Texas law.
The twerp could not be more out of touch with Austin. He needs to spend less time blabbing like your standard raging Marxist and start listening to the citizens of Austin who want nothing to do with his hate and ineptitude. https://t.co/ubpzdy9GKl
A devastating night for the legacy of @MayorAdler.
From winning re-election by 40 points…to staking his entire second term on the homeless issue by eliminating all rules….to watching the ban being reinstated in a landslide.
Casar is taking some big losses tonight…Prop B, Socialist Dollars, and Strong Mayor all looking like they, like his influence, is going down the proverbial dumpster fire.
Major victories today in #ATX. @MayorAdler and @GregCasar can finally shove it talking about how Austinites "wanted" that ban lifted years ago. They didn't then & they've spoken now. Love seeing Greg get put in his place on several items. #PropB@Austin_Networkhttps://t.co/WA8VmcR6Rg
The execution of the camping ban is going to be a shitshow. ATX council is going to throw endless amounts of tax dollars to try to house everyone and increase taxes. This was their plan all along. Our next fight is going to be to stop the homeless industry and non profit grift.
If you live in the Austin City Limits and haven’t voted yet, go vote for Proposition B today. Travis County Voting locations are here, while Williamson County voting locations can be looked up here.
Voters finally have a chance to undo Steve Adler and the Austin City Council’s bumsville madness.
The country had “done nothing about immigration in 30 years,” (most of them under Clinton and Obama), except that under Trump illegal immigration was reduced by 90 percent, and the principal problem was effectively solved until Biden stopped construction of the southern border wall and reopened the borders. He said it was time to do something about the ”dreamers” but that was not the policy of his party when Trump attempted to help them. Biden called for resources to deal with the “root cause of why people are fleeing” Central America as if it were the business of the United States to raise the welfare of those poor countries, and feed more graft into them, rather than to monitor its own border and apply a sane system of an admission of immigrants.
He revived the old Obama nonsense about combating employment with unionized green jobs, and leaped into the time warp of bygone days with the bunk that “the middle class built the country and the unions built the middle class, and we must promote the right to unionize.” Unions today are an almost wholly retrograde force redundant to market pressures for higher wages and better working conditions and largely confined to the stagnant backwater the public sector.
The former administration created huge numbers of “millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes…adding $2 trillion of debt and extending the pay disparity between the chief executive and the lowest wage earner to 320 to 1.” Naturally ignored were the facts that under his predecessor the income taxes of 83 percent of taxpayers were reduced, the number of positions to be filled exceeded the number of unemployed by over 750,000 and the lowest 20 percent of income-earners was in percentage terms gaining income more swiftly than the top ten percent.
He taxed the former administration with “trickle-down” economics, though that charge was leveled at President Reagan’s massively popular and successful economic policies. Most outrageously, Biden took all credit for 220 million vaccinations with no hint that if it had not been for Trump’s direct intervention to accelerate the development of vaccines, none of it would have happened.
Almost as disingenuous was the claim that House of Representatives Bill Number 1, which would effectively eliminate any serious method of verifying the validity of individual votes, is really an attack on the Republican effort to attack “the sacred right to vote.“ That bill is almost certainly unconstitutional, would institutionalize and protect mass ballot harvesting, and it ignores the fact that 77 percent of Americans support photo-identification for voters.
The climate was again bandied as an “existential crisis” even though Biden acknowledged that the U.S. only provides 15 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. He also omitted to mention its splendid record in reducing those omissions even though there remains no convincing argument that they are relevant to the alleged crisis. Foreign affairs was an unrecognizable dreamworld: ”while leading with our allies” and “working closely“ with them to deal with Iran and North Korea, (principally by recommitting the West to acquiescing in Iranian nuclear militarization), he will ”stand up to (Chinese leader) Xi” whom he realizes is ”in deadly earnest” in his determination to supplant the United States as the world’s most important country.
After the usual reassertion that everyone is created equal, Biden slipped in the need to ”root out systemic racism that plagues America… White supremacy is terrorism” and has “surpassed Jihadism” as a menace. He gave no hint of what he thinks of organizations that are constantly threatening to burn America down if they’re not successful in extracting a full-body immersion in self-humiliation from the majority of Americans who despise all racism. Rarely in his rabidly bowdlerized summary of the nation’s affairs does the president allow the truth to intrude. This made the opposition response by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina particularly effective.
Biden tried to persuade his audience that gun violence has exploded due to the expiration of the ban on “assault weapons” in the early 2000s.
In fact, says [David] Harsanyi, “the rate of gun homicide continued falling for more than a decade after the ban ended, even though gun ownership exploded.” Indeed, “from 2006, overall homicides fell ten out of 14 years” and “twenty-one years after a gun violence peaked in 1993, and a decade after the assault-weapon ban ended, homicides by firearms hit a historic low.”
Another pro-President Joe Biden union just told its rank-and-file members: Sorry, guys, you are all fired.
Last week, the United Mine Workers of America union endorsed Biden’s energy policies. Yes, you read that right. The coal-mining union bosses have embraced a bill that outlaws coal mining.
This is about as dumb as the Pipefitters Union endorsing Biden for president. He repaid them with his first act as president — killing the Keystone pipeline. So now we have the Pipefitters Union against pipelines and the coal miners union against coal.
Did anyone bother to actually ask the rank-and-file members what they thought? Can they get their union dues back?
They should. The livelihoods of more than 50,000 coal miners just got sold down the river by their own union bosses.
State Reps. Steve Toth (R-The Woodlands) and James White (R-Hillister) are each carrying an identical duplicate of the bill, though the Public Education Committee of the Texas House only passed Toth’s. White’s twin never received a hearing.
The bill tackles a number of educational tactics feared by some Republicans to be nascent trends in the classroom, such as “action civics,” overly political curriculums, and a strain of sociological thought which organizes racism through structural rather than interpersonal terms, translated from academia to popular literacy by bestselling writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and commonly called “critical race theory.”
Specifically, the bill would adjust three key areas of education: the state curriculum, classroom education, and training for teachers and other employees.
It would require the State Board of Education to include an understanding of the country’s founding documents in the state curriculum standards, as well as an understanding of “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government.”
On top of barring teachers from asking students to engage in political activism, the bill would also forbid teachers from promoting racial preferences or concepts like inherent racism and racial guilt. It bans similar ways of teaching with regards to gender, such as fostering guilt on account of sex, teaching inherent or unconscious sexism, and encouraging worse treatment for one sex over another.
Lastly, it would forbid “training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex” for school employees.
Deeply embarrassing leaked audio has surfaced which has sparked a crisis in Iran and which may negatively impact ongoing nuclear talks in Vienna. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was heard in audio confirmed by The New York Times as authentic saying that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) overrules many government decisions, strongly suggesting it’s the military that’s actually fully in control of the country. While this may be to some degree stating the obvious, it’s hugely unexpected for Iran’s top civilian diplomat to actually candidly admit as much. One state media newspaper has already emphasized it’s a major “scandal” for the country.
Zarif is typically very guarded, but in the tapes that surfaced Sunday (it’s unclear at this point the origin of the leak) he’s heard discussing slain Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani and how the elite commander undermined him in a variety of ways, noting he often went against Iran’s interests. The audio interview took place over two months ago, reports say, and was intended as a classified “oral history” project covering President Rouhani’s two terms in office from Zarif’s perspective.
“In the Islamic Republic the military field rules,” Zarif is heard telling a pro-government journalist.”I have sacrificed diplomacy for the military field rather than the field servicing diplomacy.” He goes so far as to say that Soleimani would often task himself as Iran’s top diplomat with “requirements”.
We know now that former secretary of state John Kerry isn’t merely a critic of Israel; he is an adversary. In leaked audiotapes obtained by the U.K.-based Iran International, as reported by the New York Times, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a supporter that the former secretary of state had informed him about “at least” 200 covert Israeli actions against Iranian interests in Syria. Zarif listened to this information in “astonishment.”
Snip.
A high-ranking American official feels comfortable sharing this information with an autocratic adversary — a government that’s murdered hundreds of Americans, regularly kidnapped them, interfered with our elections, and propped up a regime that gasses its people — about the covert actions of a long-time American ally. What else did he tell Zarif? The Times doesn’t say.
It wouldn’t be surprising if Israel was more reluctant to share intel with the United States when Democrats such as Kerry show more fondness for those making genocidal threats against the Jewish people than they do for the state that protects them. It’s worth remembering that others like Senator Chris Murphy (who is now “requesting a classified briefing” on the Natanz incident, in which Israel likely sabotaged a nuclear facility) also secretly met with Zarif in Munich in a coordinated effort to undercut the Trump administration’s efforts to derail Iran’s ongoing nuclear-weapons program — an incident that comports far more closely with the definition of “collusion” than anything turned up against Trump officials. We have no idea what Murphy discussed with Zarif, either.
We do know that after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani — head of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force and the terror group behind the death of over 600 American servicemen and thousands of others — Kerry and Murphy were among the many people scaremongering over a “massive regional war” that never materialized. In his leaked conversation, Zarif says of Soleimani that “by assassinating him in Iraq, the United States delivered a major blow to Iran, more damaging than if it had wiped out an entire city in an attack.”
“A citizen in the State of Illinois is not born with a Second Amendment right. Nor does that right insure when a citizen turns 18 or 21 years of age. It is a façade. They only gain that right if they pay a $10 fee, complete the proper application, and submit a photograph.
If the right to bear arms and self-defense are truly core rights, there should be no burden on the citizenry to enjoy those rights, especially within the confines and privacy of their own homes. A citizen’s Second Amendment rights should not be treated in the same manner as a driver’s license.”
“One Year After George Floyd, Minneapolis Is ‘Murderapolis‘ Again.”
It simply cannot be disputed that the prevalence of unjust killing and violence in the Twin Cities area has vastly increased since last summer’s protests and riots. Minneapolis recorded its second-most homicides ever in 2020 — after only 1995, when the city was ignobly dubbed “Murderapolis” in national media. And the trend has continued to escalate in 2021: between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.
“We’re gonna blow Murderopolis off the charts this year,” one Minneapolis cop told me. (Names in this post have been withheld or partially redacted. As you may be aware, there is often intense suspicion of journalists amongst both civilians and police.)
The situation is roughly the same in Saint Paul, which tied its all-time record for homicides in 2020. This year, it is on pace to break that record comfortably. The latest homicide was on Sunday night; a man was shot and killed outside a bar in an apparent carjacking. I visited the bar the following day and there was hardly any sign something was amiss — the manager only insisted that the killing had nothing to do with the bar. (Carjackings in the area have surged to an astronomical degree…)
“There’s way more people it seems like with guns now than there ever has been,” another Minneapolis cop told me, and “much less hesitation to use them.” These officers theorize that the explanation for the crime surge is related to the city’s political climate over the past year, which in their view has allowed perpetrators to wreak havoc without consequence. “They feel emboldened and they feel untouchable, in my opinion,” the cop said.
“Chinese Smart TV-Maker Accused of Spying on Owners’ Other Devices. “Smart TVs made by Skyworth were found to have an app — Gozen Data — installed on the Android-based operating system of the TV, according to a post on the V2EX website titled ‘My TV is monitoring all connected devices.’ According to the post, Gozen Data scanned for and collected the names of his computer, his network interface card, IP addresses, and the usernames of those connected to his and other local wifi networks.” Chinese electronic devices spying? Try to contain your shock…
“Faced with complaints from parents about the indoctrination of children, an official in Rockwood School District, Missouri, instructed teachers to create two sets of curriculum: a false one to share with parents, and then the real set of curriculum, focused on topics like activism and privilege, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Wire.” Fire everyone.
Eric S. Raymond thinks that since Microsoft makes most of its money off its Azure cloud services these days, and most of their cloud stuff is already on Linux, that their desktop future is actually running Windows on top of Linux via an emulation layer. Maybe. But if the history of tech teaches us anything, there will probably be some new, unforeseen technology that massively disrupts the entire market. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) April 27, 2021
Researchers remove offerings left in “Satanic” Icelanidc cave intended to help ward off the apocalypse. The rest of the script pretty much writes itself, doesn’t it? (Hat tip: Jack Posobiec.)
What sort of grade do you get if you don’t even show up for school for two years? In Baltimore, a D-. “Nearly half of students in one Baltimore high school have 0.99 GPA or lower.” (Hat tip: Nick Short.)
The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to institute more measures to safeguard black lives by banning products they like. After it was announced that the Biden administration would prohibit the sale of menthol cigarettes, officials are looking at other ways the government can save the black community from itself.
Only days after the menthol ban was announced, the FDA declared that it was pushing full steam ahead with its effort to rescue the black community through what they refer to as “strategic race-based prohibition.” An FDA official explained that the fried fowl and grape-flavored cola – also known as “grape drank” – must be banned because “these hopeless negroes don’t know how to act.”
“Preventing black people from killing themselves by banning certain products is the least we can do given the level of oppression they have endured in this country,” said a high-ranking member of the Biden administration. “This is why fried chicken and grape soda have to go.”
He added: “How could they possibly survive if we don’t make these decisions for them?”
Two days from now, Austin voters will go to the polls to decide the fate of reinstating the camping ban, along with a number of other proposals. (Cheat sheet: Vote for Proposition B and against everything else.) So here’s an update on Austin news in advance of the election.
Austin crime has exploded, and it’s all due to the feckless actions of leftwing politicians:
Three members of the Austin City Council (AKA local control/city government) politicians are guilty of promoting the crime-enabling policies not unique to Austin. Mayor Steve Adler, Greg Casar, and Natasha Harper-Madison are the main culprits who expedited this radical shift away from public safety. Mayor Steve Adler has shown a careless lack of leadership on the issue, most notably during the Summer 2020 city-wide riots. Greg Casar has used the issue to push his Marxist values. Natasha Harper-Madison has exploited the safety of Austin citizens in order to promote her racism and perpetual victim ideologies. History will judge the actions of these three local partisan politicians poorly. How long are Austin citizens going to continue to sit back while these three continue their radical progressive experiment to the detriment of the city?
Austin was one of the most sought-after, safest cities, but in 2020, there was an increase in murders by 50% from the previous year. Currently in 2021, there have been a whopping 21 murders to date. Austin is well on its way to breaking last year’s record number of murders.
First, our police department is losing officers. The latest information can be found here, but here’s a summary for the TL;DR crowd:
Last year, the Austin Police Department lost about eleven officers per month through resignations and retirements. In the first four months of this fiscal year, the police department has already lost an average of fifteen officers per month. The department will have more than seventy-five vacancies by the end of January, in addition to positions previously cut from the budget.
(emphasis original)
Fewer officers in a city with a growing population means fewer officers per citizen. This means increased response times for even high priority calls. Increased response times mean less policing and thus less deterrence to crime.
The second component to this is the new policy in the Travis County District Attorney’s office under which the D.A. “will present all use-of-force cases [of law enforcement] to grand juries that involve deaths or serious injuries.” In other words, any time a citizen is injured during an arrest, the arresting officer runs the risk of being subjected to the grand jury process. The concern here is that officers will be less likely to use force moving forward. Violent criminals know this, and they know the officer will be reluctant to use force to take them into custody.
1) The homeless community has exploded, from around 2,500 to what I estimate to be 5,000 now, although according to Austonia a report commissioned by consultants for the city recently put the estimate at 10,000.
2) Homeless fires are on track to double last year’s all-time record (to 503), endangering homeless Austinites and their personal property and our courageous firefighters.
3) City parks are being destroyed all over the city, despite the fact that the camping ordinance specifically exempts parks from legal camping.
4) Every single major highway intersection is worse today, and this is especially visible on Hwy. 183 and Hwy. 71, as well as on IH-35.
5) Public safety in Austin is at the worst I can ever remember (I arrived in Austin in 1984), with our homicide rate set to double this year (after last year’s all-time record), and regular violent attacks by homeless individuals happening almost daily at this point. A quick review of the Citizen app will cause you to lose sleep at night.
6) Public health in our city is far worse today than it would be without the ordinance, as the city had no plan for the human and physical waste created by camping, and we regularly see human feces, drug needles and other waste at encampments across the city.
7) Tourism has taken a direct hit. Major hotels are losing conferences, visitors are shocked to see what’s become of Austin, and the related economic effect on the hospitality and service industries has been profound.
What is happening in Austin is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. It threatens the health and safety of the community, and in particular of those struggling with homelessness.
According to pre-COVID-19 data released in late March by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the number of Austin’s unsheltered population—those who live in makeshift tents around the city—has risen a staggering 93% since 2016.
The Austin metro area represents 7% of the overall population of Texas, but about 25% of Texas’ unsheltered population today resides on its streets today.
Snip.
It is important to understand the origin of Austin’s homelessness surge. In 2013, HUD rolled out a one-size-fits-all homelessness policy, called Housing First, with spotty evidence of efficacy. Their “solution” to homelessness? Provide life-long, “no strings attached” housing—no requirement of sobriety, no work requirement, no requirement to access services to change the behaviors that led to homelessness. Austin’s elected officials took the bait—hook, line, and sinker.
HUD promised the Housing First approach would end homelessness in a decade. Instead, it resulted in an over 16% increase across the nation, including a 21% increase in the “unsheltered” population—ironically, the population for which this approach was originally designed.
Because Austin elected officials chose to follow HUD down an uncharted rabbit hole, Austin has experienced the same disastrous results, indeed the same disastrous results California has seen since it adopted Housing First in 2016—a stunning 37% increase in homelessness.
Austin’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force recommended in a work session Wednesday the idea of doing away with several police units in the next budget cycle. It suggests reallocating the money for other needs.
Two of the units one workgroup focused on are those that involve animals — APD’s Mounted Patrol and K9 Units.
“There are many tools police have. These happen to be very costly,” said Kathy Mitchell, chair of the workgroup that made the recommendations.
The Reimagining Public Safety Task Force estimates that APD’s Mounted Patrol and K9 units collectively cost the city nearly $5.5 million a year.
The real reason, of course is that the hard-left “Reimagining Public Safety Task Force” hates the police and wants to free up that money for left-wing crony graft. Plus they hate those units because they’re effective and provide good publicity for APD. Plus the mounted police are particularly good at breaking up riots before they start, which the #antifa/#BlackLivesMatter loving Austin left all but encourages.
Austin criminals are getting bolder:
The 911 call says they took EVERYTHING in the jewelry store
It looks like conventions are returning post Mao Tse Lung, but a lot fewer groups want to have their conventions in Austin now that it’s turned into bumsville:
I thought Jimmy Flannigan and the Texas Tribune said it was Abbott lifting the mask mandate causing all these businesses to cancel their conventions to Austin? pic.twitter.com/DwtDVSWUzA
Speaking of conventions: Austin voters properly kicked leftwing City Councilman Jimmy Flannigan to the curb in 2020. Surprise! Right after his defeat, Flannigan landed a cushy $140,000 job with “Austin Convention Enterprises, or ACE, [a] public facilities corporation that was created by the city to own, finance and operate the downtown Hilton.” Evidently once you’re a corrupt leftwing insider, you get cushy sinicures carved out for you to keep you on the government teat no matter what voters think… (Hat tip: Adam Loewy.)
Steve Adler, liar:
Here @MayorAdler is engaging in a time-honored rhetorical device known as "lying his ass off."
“In downtown, we depend on foot traffic and vehicle traffic driven primarily by visitors, hotel guests, conventioneers and locals who want to bar hop,” [B.D. Riley’s Irish Pub] co-owner Steve Basile said. “There was no path that we could draw that was anywhere more optimistic than 10 or 12 months of financial loss before downtown began to see the things that made downtown what it was pre-pandemic.”
Convention-less. Festival-less. Tourism-less. In downtown Austin, the pandemic has taken the regular menu of revenue drivers off the table, and the public health risks now attached to large, in-person gatherings and out-of-town travel have placed a particular burden on small businesses in the city’s central business district bound by Lamar Boulevard, I-35, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Lady Bird Lake.
The drain has made the math especially difficult for restaurants and bars, where bottom lines also depend on a now-dissipated office workforce, and smaller real estate footprints exacerbate the impact of social distancing rules. According to Community Impact Newspaper’s tracking of business closures, at least 10 locally owned restaurants and bars have permanently pulled out of downtown since August but, like B.D. Riley’s, have maintained business operations in other parts of the city. Their reasons signal a pessimism about the pace of recovery in the city’s center.
Proposition E wants to move to ranked voting (which is illegal under Texas law anyway). Here’s why it’s a bad idea.
Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell speaks out against the Wilco homeless hotel”
HAPPENING NOW: “Don’t Austin our Williamson County!” —Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell, is speaking at a protest outside of the Candlewood Suites. Gravell says Mayor Adler didn’t call him about purchasing the hotel to house the homeless. @KVUEpic.twitter.com/4l6d1JOARm
First-hand evidence of sex trafficking among the Adlervilles, and how no government entity would help:
#SB987, Texas statewide ban on public camping #txlege Texas Senate Committee meeting / Austin open camping Sex trafficking/drugs in homeless encampments Testimony #2
#SB987, Texas statewide ban on public camping #txlege Texas Senate Committee meeting / Austin open camping Sex trafficking/drugs in homeless encampments Testimony #2
On a normal day, Ullrich Water Treatment Plant produces roughly half of Austin’s drinkable water and is crucial to keeping the city’s water system functioning.
State regulations require the plant to either have access to a backup power source or a substantial amount of water reserves in case the plant sees an unexpected shutdown. Ullrich has both.
So when a tree limb fell on an electric line leading to a substation that powered Austin’s largest water treatment plant on Feb. 17, backups should have snapped into place to keep power running and water production churning.
But there was a problem: Nobody on site knew how to operate a 52-year-old gear switch that would have restored power to the plant.
And so Ullrich Water Treatment Plant went dark for three hours in the middle of the worst winter storm to strike Central Texas in decades. It cut off roughly half of the city’s potable water production and deepened the winter weather crisis that at that moment had thousands shivering without electricity in their homes.
