BBC correspondents heard loud bangs in the capital Kyiv, as well as Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. Blasts have also been heard in the southern port city of Odesa.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had carried out missile strikes on Ukraine’s infrastructure and on border guards.
Russia’s defence ministry has denied attacking Ukrainian cities – saying it was targeting military infrastructure, air defence and air forces with “high-precision weapons”.
Tanks and troops have poured into Ukraine at points along its eastern, southern and northern borders, Ukraine says.
Russian military convoys have crossed from Belarus into Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region, and from Russia into the Sumy region, which is also in the north, Ukraine’s border guard service (DPSU) said.
Belarus is a long-time ally of Russia. Analysts describe the small country as Russia’s “client state”.
Convoys have also entered the eastern Luhansk and Kharkiv regions, and moved into the Kherson region from Crimea – a territory that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
If multiple Russian convoys just crossed the border without significant opposition from ground troops (either tanks or hidden soldiers with antitank and RPGs) it’s quite the indictment of Ukrainian war-planning.
The Russian offensive was preceded by artillery fire and there were injuries to border guards, the DPSU said.
There have also been reports of troops landing by sea at the Black Sea port cities of Mariupol and Odesa in the south. A British resident of Odesa told the BBC many people were leaving.
As I mentioned last night, Putin’s fiction that this is “a military operation in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region” is an obvious lie. Here’s a tweet highlighting the wide range of Russia’s operations:
Here is a map of all the verified Russian attacks on Ukraine as of 3:30 am last night. Just a reminder that just a day and a half ago, Putin was claiming he was just sending in “peacekeeping” forces to defend the area circled in yellow. pic.twitter.com/f7byy9WARK
(Some of the footage circulating on Twitter is evidently from previous conflicts. Hopefully the above are not among them, but if they are let me know.)
There are conflicting reports on whether Antonov International Airport on the outskirts of Kiev is currently in Russian hands or not. The fighting there has reportedly gone back and forth.
At least 16 cities in Ukraine are reporting explosions. Footage of cruise missiles flying over Ukrainian heads is appearing on social media. Apparently, a Russian soldier parachuting into Ukraine has posted video of himself on TikTok. There are reports that Belarusian military forces have joined the Russian forces in attacks on Ukrainian border guards.
We are witnessing, on our television screens and through the web, the largest land war in Europe since 1945, an unprovoked attack by an autocratic superpower with nuclear weapons against a flawed but independent democracy that had committed no crime or provocation. The world is less safe today than it was at the start of the week. Many Ukrainians are already dead, some Russian forces have likely also been killed, and a lot more people will die in the near future.
This is exactly the nightmare scenario that U.S., NATO, and European Union policy aimed to prevent; short of a Russian invasion of NATO member states, this is the worst-case scenario. This is not another relatively small-scale, minimal-conflict land grab like the Russian seizure and occupation of Crimea in 2014. This is the full wrath of the Russian war machine coming down like a ton of bricks on a country of 80 million people.
At the most basic level, realism begins with the recognition that wars occur because there is no agency or central authority that can protect states from one another and stop them from fighting if they choose to do so. Given that war is always a possibility, states compete for power and sometimes use force to try to make themselves more secure or gain other advantages. There is no way states can know for certain what others may do in the future, which makes them reluctant to trust one another and encourages them to hedge against the possibility that another powerful state may try to harm them at some point down the road.
Liberalism sees world politics differently. Instead of seeing all great powers as facing more or less the same problem—the need to be secure in a world where war is always possible—liberalism maintains that what states do is driven mostly by their internal characteristics and the nature of the connections among them. It divides the world into “good states” (those that embody liberal values) and “bad states” (pretty much everyone else) and maintains that conflicts arise primarily from the aggressive impulses of autocrats, dictators, and other illiberal leaders. For liberals, the solution is to topple tyrants and spread democracy, markets, and institutions based on the belief that democracies don’t fight one another, especially when they are bound together by trade, investment, and an agreed-on set of rules.
After the Cold War, Western elites concluded that realism was no longer relevant and liberal ideals should guide foreign-policy conduct. As the Harvard University professor Stanley Hoffmann told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in 1993, realism is “utter nonsense today.” U.S. and European officials believed that liberal democracy, open markets, the rule of law, and other liberal values were spreading like wildfire and a global liberal order lay within reach. They assumed, as then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton put it in 1992, that “the cynical calculus of pure power politics” had no place in the modern world and an emerging liberal order would yield many decades of democratic peace. Instead of competing for power and security, the world’s nations would concentrate on getting rich in an increasingly open, harmonious, rules-based liberal order, one shaped and guarded by the benevolent power of the United States.
Had this rosy vision been accurate, spreading democracy and extending U.S. security guarantees into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence would have posed few risks. But that outcome was unlikely, as any good realist could have told you. Indeed, opponents of enlargement were quick to warn that Russia would inevitably regard NATO enlargement as a threat and going ahead with it would poison relations with Moscow. That is why several prominent U.S. experts—including diplomat George Kennan, author Michael Mandelbaum, and former defense secretary William Perry—opposed enlargement from the start. Then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were initially opposed for the same reasons, though both later shifted their positions and joined the pro-enlargement bandwagon.
Proponents of expansion won the debate by claiming it would help consolidate the new democracies in Eastern and Central Europe and create a “vast zone of peace” across all of Europe. In their view, it didn’t matter that some of NATO’s new members were of little or no military value to the alliance and might be hard to defend because peace would be so robust and enduring that any pledge to protect those new allies would never have to be honored.
Moreover, they insisted that NATO’s benign intentions were self-evident and it would be easy to persuade Moscow not to worry as NATO crept closer to the Russian border. This view was naive in the extreme, for the key issue was not what NATO’s intentions may have been in reality. What really mattered, of course, was what Russia’s leaders thought they were or might be in the future. Even if Russian leaders could have been convinced that NATO had no malign intentions, they could never be sure this would always be the case.
One need not buy all of Walt’s assertions to realize that liberal foreign policy wonks got Russia badly wrong.
One of the problems with using economic sanctions as your primary tool of deterrence in foreign policy is that eventually you’ll run into a hostile foe or force that does not care about trading with the U.S. or even money at all. In fact, it is fair to wonder how much money motivates any of America’s current foes.
The Taliban certainly don’t particularly care about money; they think they’re on a mission from Allah. Iran has been hit with just about every sanction in the book, and no doubt it’s had an impact on the Iranian economy, but the mullahs don’t seem to care much. Kim Jong-un and the North Korean regime have been sanctioned many, many times, and they just keep getting better and better at evading them. The U.S. and China are too economically intertwined to easily enact sanctions that are serious enough to alter the decision-making in Beijing.
And then there’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia — a government that foresaw the types of moves the West was likely to make, and prepared accordingly:
Russia has drastically reduced its use of dollars, and therefore Washington’s leverage. It has stockpiled enormous currency reserves, and trimmed its budgets, to keep its economy and government services going even under isolation. It has reoriented trade and sought to replace Western imports.
But even more than that, for a greedy kleptocrat, Putin doesn’t seem primarily motivated by money or his country’s economic prospects. Putin’s address yesterday was a long stream of grievances, and it is clear that what really enrages him is that Russia is not as powerful as it was when he was a younger man and the Soviet Union existed.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, is a cooperative of financial institutions formed in 1973 and headquartered in Belgium. It is overseen by the National Bank of Belgium with cooperation from other major central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank.
But SWIFT is not a traditional bank and does not transfer funds. Rather, it acts as a secure messaging system that links more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories, alerting banks when transactions are going to occur. (For instance, American banks have a unique SWIFT code that customers use for incoming wire transfers in U.S. dollars.)
In 2021, SWIFT said it recorded an average of 42 million messages per day, an 11 percent increase from the year before. In 2020, Russia accounted for 1.5 percent of transactions.
For the U.S. and its European allies, cutting Russia out of the SWIFT financial system would be one of the toughest financial steps they could take, damaging Russia’s economy immediately and in the long term. The move could cut Russia off from most international financial transactions, including profits from oil and gas production, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the country’s revenue.
“But doing so, which some financial analysts have likened to a ‘nuclear option,’ would be an unprecedented move against one of the world’s largest economies.”
No, a financial sanction for one nation invading another is not a “nuclear option.” When it comes to war, the nuclear option is literally the nuclear option.
Putin will happily trade some short-term economic sacrifice for rebuilding an empire. China will gladly undergo some trade sanctions to take Taiwan. Iran will cheerfully be excised from global trade to destroy Israel.
There is a reason that Stalin is still the highest-polling leader in Russia. In her Nobel Prize–winning oral history Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich quotes a former Communist factory worker imprisoned and beaten half to death by the regime.
As an old man, the imprisoned worker said, “When I go into my grandchildren’s room, everything in there is foreign: the shirts, the jeans, the books, the music…Savages! I want to die a Communist. That’s my final wish.”
The West is failing because it not only doesn't understand why other countries feel this way, but because we ourselves have given up any belief in a higher purpose.
Putin’s Big Ukrainian Adventure isn’t doing wonders for the Russian stock market.
Russia’s stock market has lost nearly 40% of its value today — and at one point was down nearly 45%. It’s one of the biggest single-day meltdowns in modern market history.
Though Russian forces are quite formidable on paper (especially now that Russia has reportedly achieved air superiority over most of Ukraine), a whole lot of variables are at play in this war. How well maintained is all those old Soviet weapons Russian has lying around? How much of it has been modernized? How long can they sustain this rapid pace of operation? How much has Soviet doctrine changed following what they learned in Grozny? Soviet/Russian experience in counter-insurgency operations has generally not been a happy one. How stiff a resistance can Ukraine put up against the Russian invasion?
Finally, what is Putin’s real goal: Ukraine acquiescing to his previous territorial conquests, Findlandization and agreement never to join NATO, incorporation of all Russian-speaking areas into Russia proper, installing a Russian-friendly puppet government, or actual outright conquest of all of Ukraine? Which he’s aiming for will determine how much pain he’s willing to let Russia endure and how difficult the military task will be.
My god: “An invasion has begun” by Russia into #Ukraine. Our @mchancecnn is reporting right now that an advisor to Ukraine Interior Minister says the sounds of explosions are missle strikes and Russia is invading. The explosions can be heard in the Capitol Kyiv. War has begun. pic.twitter.com/ho0KzoEbn6
Biden’s weakness and cognitive decline clearly emboldened Putin, and Ukrainians will be paying the price. It remains to be seen whether he just wants control over Russian-speaking portions of Ukraine, or actually wants to wipe it off the globe and incorporate the territory into Russia.
When I surveyed readers about what they wanted to see covered, several voiced support for more state political news. And early voting ends Friday. So here’s a long-in-gestation post on the state of the Governor’s Race.
The problem is that, while I’d love to see a competitive Republican primary, I’m not sure there is one.
Despite Allen West claiming he’s in the lead (don’t buy it) and Don Huffines dropping a significant amount of direct mailers, this is not only Greg Abbott’s race to lose, at this point I doubt he’s even going to be drawn into a runoff.
Before we get to the details, let’s deal with the incredulity outside the state that Abbott is even in any sort of race at all. He’s a conservative Republican incumbent, isn’t he?
Incumbent? Yes. Republican? Yes. Conservative? By the standards of Democrat-run states, unquestionably. I’m sure the Republican residents of California, Michigan, New York and Washington would love to trade their Democratic governors for Abbott. But among conservative activists, there is a simmering resentment that Abbott hasn’t been nearly as conservative on a number of topics as he could be, that he’s “left money on the table” and talks a much better game than he’s actually accomplished.
But let’s start with the things Abbott has gotten right. Under Abbott, Texas has generally controlled spending, and the low tax and low regulation environment has seen the Texas economy recovery quickly from the Flu Manchu lockdown recession. So too has Texas continued to lure big companies and projects from other states to Texas, from Apple to Samsung to Tesla.
So too, Abbott has been on the right side of just about social issue. He’s been consistently pro-Second Amendment. Texas’ innovative abortion law was hailed by pro-life groups across the country. Abbott has talked a good game on the Biden Administration’s inability to secure the border, and got funding for border wall construction passed.
But a lot of conservative activists have accused Abbott of being all hat and no cattle. For example:
Take Abbott’s much-vaunted Operation Lone Star, an effort by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard to secure the Texas border with Mexico. Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, the implementation leaves much to be desired:
“It was common knowledge inside the command group that [Operation Lone Star] is just a political stunt,” retired Command Sergeant Major Jason Featherston, who served as Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Texas Army National Guard, told Chronicles. “Do I think we should have soldiers on the border? Absolutely. But what’s gone wrong with this is that it was hastily done and poorly planned.”
Featherston was present at the birth of Operation Lone Star and retired from his career while overseeing the Texas Military Department’s largest branch (the Army National Guard), with 19,000 people under him. Featherston said that while he cares little for politics, his “number one priority in all of this is making sure soldiers get paid on time and get the equipment they need and that they and their families are treated the way they need to be treated.” A lot of that isn’t happening or has been fraught with setbacks.
The border guards lack of basic equipment, and many troops don’t even have access to portable bathrooms, Featherston said.
There is also the huge issue of the 2021 ice storm power outage. Obviously Greg Abbott doesn’t control the weather, but he does control appointments to ERCOT, and touted trendy renewable energy that proved inadequate for preserving baseline power needs during the emergency. All that said, the grid held up just fine during the most recent (far less severe) cold snap, which may eliminate the last hope of Abbott’s primary opponents (and Beto O’Rourke) to lay a glove on him.
While Abbott lifted Texas lockdown restrictions earlier than many states, he did issue a slew of constitutionally questionable mandates during the early states of the coronavirus pandemic, including lockdowns and mask mandates. He was also notably slower than governors like Ron DeSantis at lifting restrictions.
Abbott has frequently been criticized both for being more reactive on culture war issues like Critical Race Theory and transsexual genital mutilation procedures on children, and that he has relied on executive orders rather than pushing for special session bills to pass laws to rectify the problem.
Abbott has also been dinged for raising money in California, something Ted Cruz (rightly) dinged both David Dewhurst and Beto O’Rourke over.
There’s a lot of truth to some of these charges, but I also don’t think any of them will actually derail Battleship Abbott. With his huge name recognition, money advantage and polling currently showing him at 60%, I expect Abbott to win to the primary and slaughter O’Rourke in the general.
Ricky Lynn Perry, AKA “not that Rick Perry.” I cannot find either website or Twitter feed for this guy, so that link goes to a Texas Tribune article on him. Here’s his iVoter profile. He’s not a serious candidate, and I only mention him here so nobody gets fooled by seeing “Rick Perry” on the ballot.
Unsurprisingly, Abbott’s war chest tops the charts, with $62.6 million cash on hand, having raised nearly $1.5 million in the first 20 days of January. Abbott has also spent more than $4.5 million in the same period as he campaigns around the state, releasing mailers and radio and TV advertisements.
Solidly in second, Huffines raised more than $1.1 million in the same timespan, bringing his total cash on hand to $2.3 million. Huffines’ expenditures show more than $2.7 million spent as he crisscrosses the state campaigning to Texans.
Meanwhile, West raised $331,000 and maintains about $83,000 cash on hand as of January 20. West spent more than $230,000 in 20 days on campaigning and advertising as he traverses the state to speak with Texans.
The Texas Ethics Commission is not showing Prather’s January 31 report, only his previous report accounting for July-December 2021. During that time, the report shows Prather raised more than $100,000 and had around $20,000 cash on hand.
That little money for Allen West doesn’t show a candidate that’s ahead.
I’ve tried numerous times to get a meeting with the governor,” said Miller. “In the seven years that we’ve both been in our offices, I’ve never got a meeting with the governor, never got a phone call returned, never got an email or letter returned.”
Miller continued to express his frustration in Abbott’s lack of communication and explained just how difficult it is to get in contact with the governor.
“Well, it’s kind of like working with sasquatch,” said Miller. “Everybody knows he’s real and some people have seen him, but I’ve never seen him. I can’t get a meeting with him.”
I’ve gotten several direct mailers from Huffines, including one in which he states his opposition to Critical Race Theory and LGBT ideology. I’ve gotten none from Abbott (though he has sent me a zillion fundraising emails) or West (and a lesser number of fundraiser emails).
The idea of a Jordan B. Peterson music video sounds like an idea that might be wall-to-wall cringe. But this is actually a pretty effective ditty that combines early Kate Bush with The Wall-era Pink Floyd.
“Wake Up: Dedicated, under the current unfortunate conditions, to the Prime Minister of Canada, the Right Honorable Justin Trudeau. “
Though quite jaundiced and cynical about the “good intentions” of our national and international elites (political and otherwise), I’ve tried to avoid buying into conspiracy theories about a “great reset” being planned for us by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum. But now come news that Justin Trudeau wants to make all the “temporary” expanded financial surveillance powers permanent.
As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level.
The Trudeau government’s financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority.
In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden “the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.” That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., “Fintrac”). “As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,” Freeland said. She justified the move as a way to “mitigate the risk” of “illicit funds” and “increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement.” Trudeau, standing behind Freeland at the press conference, nodded his head in agreement.
Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had “highlighted the fact” that digital assets and funding mechanisms “weren’t captured” by the Canadian government’s pre-existing surveillance powers. As a result, she said, “the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis.”
That seems an awful lot less like an emergency measure to deal with honking truckers and more like a naked power grab to further the building of a sinister, ubiquitous surveillance state, doesn’t it? It’s the sort of thing that makes accusations of trying to impose a Chinese-style social credit system on western democracies a lot more credible, doesn’t it?
It doesn’t help that Schwab dresses and talks like a supervillain.
Why do they dress like sci-fi supervillains? Klaus Schwab looks like he could be on the set of Babylon 5 or The Expanse. pic.twitter.com/qgQVUDALDt
James Lindsay has a long thread on Schwab’s book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, his sweeping vision of “a technological fusion of the ‘physical, digital, and biological worlds,’ which is creepy transhumanism under their direction.”
Read this however you want, but this is Schwab's stated objective: to take the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is already naturally underway, and shape it according to his vision. That vision is elsewhere seen to be fascistic, Communist, transhumanist, and under WEF control. pic.twitter.com/6wUigHDpNB
— James Lindsay, useful degenerate (@ConceptualJames) February 21, 2022
Is all this just paranoid pattern-matching confirmation bias? Possibly. Let’s hope so. It probably is crazy to ascribe every baleful trend of recent memory (social justice, creeping authoritarianism, tranny madness, rising crime, pedophilia among left-wing elites, media insistence that ordinary people need to start eating bugs, etc.) to one grand conspiracy. It’s paranoid to ascribe every problem to a single malevolent actor. There are always going to be competing agendas by competing power players. It’s a mistake to assume that all the bad guys, from Schwab to George Soros to Bill Gates to Xi Jinping, are on the same team, working with each other. That way lies madness.
But there sure seems to be a whole lot of something going on.
Scott DeShields of Kentucky Ballistics managed to blow up a single-shot Serbu RN 50 again, but this time it was intentional.
Back in 2021, he was almost killed when a hot round blew up his gun. Serbu was kind enough to send him the same model to test to destruction, which he does with proper precautions.
He tests leftover SLAP rounds from the batch that caused the explosion, and there’s obviously something wrong with them, with punched primers and spent rounds that require herculean efforts to extract from the chamber. But they don’t blow it up.
So he gets out a round specially designed to produce 190,000 PSI of pressure, more than three times the usual 55,000 PSI for a normal .50 BMG round.
That does the trick.
Skip to 23 minutes in if you want to get right to the money shot. Spoiler: Not only does the 190,000 PSI round blow up the gun, it blows it up in exactly the same way.
Justin Trudeau’s storm troopers start arresting peaceful protesters, he wants to kidnap the children and dogs of free Canadian citizens who dared to bruise his fragile ego, Texas sends more lawsuits flying, and another case of Sudden Epstein Death Syndrome. It’s the Friday Saturday LinkSwarm!
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled parliamentary debate today as federal police began arresting protesting truckers and confiscating vehicles. Trudeau did not want to face government while the operation to break the back of the freedom protestors begins.
Early this morning, federal police assembled a convoy of heavy tow trucks to begin the operation. The identities of the tow truck companies were masked by painting over the logos to avoid retaliation. RCMP and Ottawa police then brought in Armored Personnel Carriers (MRAP’s and APC’s) to support the operation.
Media were told to leave the enforcement zone to help hide the optics of heavily armed RCMP tactical units, and they began breaking the windows of the trucks and forcibly removing the truck drivers. For the same reason, popular social media YouTuber’s, who had been broadcasting livestreams, were arrested as the operation began.
They’re also threatening to take children from protesting parents. “Just imagine the uproar that would ensue if Trump had taken children from Black Lives Matters protesters.”
“When Fascism Comes To America, It Will Look Like Justin Trudeau’s Canada. Trudeau’s dangerous not just because he’s abusing Canadians, but because he is providing the wish list for crackdowns by Democrats in the U.S.: Every single bank, credit union, investment broker and insurance provider in the country has been deputized to figure out if they have a blockader as a client, and to immediately freeze their accounts if so.”
It’s public health 101: if you want to protect people from a +99% survivable virus, you trample them with horses in front of their kids and euthanize their pets and freeze their bank accounts
The Chicago Teachers Union provides a real-world example of what happens when a government union has too much power.
CTU has gone on strike three times in three school years. In the latest work stoppage, over 330,000 schoolchildren missed five days of school. Parents were notified of the walkout after 11 p.m. on a school night, leaving them just hours to develop a back-up plan after the union decided not to show up.
This shut-down follows the 2020-2021 school year, when Chicago Public Schools was fully remote for most of the year, rolling out hybrid options starting in February 2021. All told, Chicago students had gone 17 months without fully in-person education by the time they started the current school year Aug. 30, 2021.
And students’ academic achievement suffered for it. One example: On the SATs, there was a 6.1 percentage point decrease in the number of Chicago students at least meeting standards in math – and a drop of 6.7 percentage points for the same category for low-income students – in 2021 compared to 2019.
But CTU’s political muscle – and their willingness to flex it – could become the blueprint for schools and government at all levels if Illinois’ powerful government-sector unions get what they’re asking for at the polls in November. They want an amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would give unelected government union bosses more power than state law or the people elected to represent residents’ best interests.
Snip.
Amendment 1 is billed as a right-to-work ban in a state that already doesn’t allow right to work, but it’s much more than that. It would give unions a “fundamental” right to organize and bargain over wages, hours, working conditions, economic welfare and safety at work – i.e., virtually anything – and explicitly prohibit lawmakers from ever interfering with or diminishing those rights.
Unions would be able to demand anything during negotiations and go on strike to get their demands met. Resulting contracts would carry the weight of the state constitution. Lawmakers wouldn’t be able to restrict what unions can negotiate or limit when they can go on strike without running afoul of the state constitution.
What’s more, lawmakers would never be able to repeal a little-known Illinois provision that allows many union contracts to override conflicting state and local laws and regulations.
Known in legal parlance as a “supercedence clause,” the practical effect is that a union will be able to rewrite laws it doesn’t like just by negotiating a contrary provision in its contract. If the employer doesn’t agree? The union goes on strike. And government officials’ hands will be tied.
That includes laws in place to protect children.
A provision requiring “background information” on employees of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services – the department charged with protecting children who are reported abused or neglected – could be contradicted in the union’s contract with the state.
So could the provision prohibiting employment of “sexually dangerous” persons.
Paxton and Texas also sued Facebook over facial recognition. “Facebook unlawfully captured the biometric identifiers of Texans for a commercial purpose without their informed consent, disclosed those identifiers to others, and failed to destroy collected identifiers within a reasonable time.”
“San Francisco police linked a woman to a crime using DNA from her rape exam, D.A. Boudin says.” Though the charges were dropped, this seems like not only a clear Fourth Amendment violation, but an absolute abuse of trust. “Sure, just give your DNA to the government! There’s no way they would ever abuse that!” Can you believe that Soros-backed Boudin is the subject of a recall petition?
This isn’t just the crest of a wave: if Republicans offer a positive, credible alternative, as @GlennYoungkin did in Virginia, it’s the making of a realignment. https://t.co/5lzpE6B7IL
Let me see if I have the timeline on this story correct: 1. Leftwing racial justice activist Quintez Brown attempts to assassinate Louisville Democratic mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg, and 2. He’s almost immediately bailed out for a paltry $100,000 by #BlackLivesMatter? How often is bail set so low for attempted political assassinations?
CRT got blown away by a massive truth bomb dropped by North Carolina dad — and local GOP candidate — Brian Echevarria at his school board meeting on Monday.
“As a parent, I speak to other parents,” he told Cabarrus County School Board members, “And there’s a few things we don’t want.”
“I’m biracial, I’m multilingual, I’m multicultural. The fact is in America and North Carolina, I can do anything I want — and I teach that to my children. And the person who tells my little pecan-color kids that they’re somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin,” he justly insisted, “would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me.”
Speaking of pedophilia: “Alternatively described as Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘best mate’ and ‘pimp’, Jean-Luc Brunel, a former French modeling agent who has been imprisoned since 2020 on charges he aided Epstein’s sex-trafficking enterprise, has committed suicide in his cell.” I think we’ve seen this movie before, and we didn’t believe the ending the first time…
Speaking of Adams: “I want to discuss the new fuckface mayor of New York City that replaced the old fuckface mayor.” The mayor that wants to force employers to enforce vaccine mandates also wants them to force workers back to their NYC offices.
What’s in it for those businesses that now realize that three hundred thousand dollars a month in office space “We don’t need it anymore.” What’s in it for those employees that figured out that they can have homes that are two or three times the size for half as much money and not have to deal with a commute every day? What’s in it for them?”
With oil prices up, so are U.S. rig counts, up to a four year high.
New Bloom County animated TV show in development for Fox. I view this with more trepidation than hope. There’s about a 95% chance the screw it up, and if they don’t, there’s a good chance Fox will cancel it anyway, since that’s their MO…
P. J. O’Rourke, RIP. I reviewed Holidays in Hell for Reason back in the day…
In 2017, a pilot aborted takeoff after V1, the inflection point for when a safe abort was still possible. “Still traveling at 100 knots, but decelerating rapidly, the plane rumbled across the grass overrun area, plowed over the airport perimeter fence, struck a raised embankment, lost its landing gear, crossed a road, and ground to a halt straddling a ditch.” Post-incident analysis showed why that was the right call. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
FLOCK DROP MYSTERY: A security camera in Chihuahua, Mexico, captured the moment hundreds of yellow-headed blackbirds suddenly fell from the sky — many nosediving to their death https://t.co/45WA052YZOpic.twitter.com/FsZkEorTc7
Jeren Miles was allegedly caught in a child sex sting that was livestreamed on YouTube channel "Predator Catchers Indianapolis." Miles is an LGBTQ activist & serves on the board of directors for Equality California. He's deleted all his social media. Video:https://t.co/Q0vylN3sLNpic.twitter.com/xCs9uSbMNE
That “allegedly” in the title is for legal reasons (even child rapist scumbags are entitled to the presumption of innocence under the Constitution), but “Sure, I flirted with a 13-year old and set up two meetings with him, and gave him my hotel room number, but I never intended to follow-through on ‘make out with you, touch you, suck you!'” is hardly a compelling defense. Indeed, defense lawyers will be playing this tape for clients for years to come just to drive the “No, seriously, just shut the fuck up” point home.
Remember how everyone laughed at “Pizzagate,” at the very idea that there was a ring of powerful Democrats that engaged in pedophilia? Well, that particular instance may well have been bunk, but since then we’ve had Epstein’s “suicide,” every other member of Antifa seems to be a convicted sex offender, and we’ve had high profile pedophiles unmasked at such liberal bastions as CNN and now Facebook.
But it seems less like a ring than a widespread fraternal organization with many different chapters.
How many more leftwing child predators are still out there?
If you wanted to place post-Virginia bets on the next locale to experience a conservative parent uprising against insane woke policies, San Francisco would be the very last city you would guess, since insane leftist policies seem to dominate at every level of city government. Yet that’s just what happened yesterday.
San Francisco residents overwhelmingly voted to oust three of the city’s progressive school-board members on Tuesday. It was the culmination of a year-long effort to reform the board, which has been accused of prioritizing social-justice politics over reopening schools and managing the district’s troubled finances during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Returns started coming in around 9 p.m. in California, showing that more than 70 percent of voters supported recalling each of the three candidates: 79 percent voted to recall board member Alison Collins, 75 percent voted to recall board president Gabriela López, and 73 percent voted to recall board member Faauuga Moliga.
Moliga conceded defeat via Twitter shortly after the first returns were released. Turnout for the election was about 24 percent, with 119,718 of the 499,771 registered voters in San Francisco casting ballots, according to the Department of Elections.
Democratic Mayor London Breed will now be tasked with appointing three new members to the seven-member board. Collins, López, and Moliga were the only members of the board who were eligible to be recalled. Their seats are up for election again in November.
“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” declared Breed in a prepared statement. “San Francisco is a city that believes in the value of big ideas, but those ideas must be built on the foundation of a government that does the essentials well.”
Tuesday’s election marked the end of a year-long recall campaign launched by Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen, two single parents and Bay Area tech professionals spurred to action by their frustration with the board’s refusal to reopen the city’s schools well into the Covid-19 pandemic.
Instead of focusing its efforts on developing a reopening plan, the board has been preoccupied with woke culture war issues, expending energy on changing the admissions process at the highly-selective Lowell High School to boost the number of black and Hispanic students and reduce the number of white and Asian students; rechristening 44 schools named after prominent Americans, including presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington; and a proposal to spend close to $1 million to paint over a historic, 80-year-old mural at a local school that depicts the life of Washington, but also includes outdated stereotypes.
The board became the focus of national ridicule last February after a two-hour debate over whether a gay white dad was diverse enough to join an all-female volunteer parent committee. All the while, the district’s budget deficit ballooned to about $125 million last year, leading California education officials to threaten a state takeover. The California Department of Education sent an expert in last year to help the school board devise a plan to close the gap.
San Francisco is the farthest left city in the country; Republicans are a rounding error there. If woke nonsense can lose on the ballot there, there’s no place in America where it can win if it’s the central issue on the ballot.
Voters in San Francisco just recalled their woke school board members by a landslide. If the parent movement can win in San Francisco, it can win anywhere. pic.twitter.com/Y8inRg1NSy
For a long time, what used to be known as moderate Democrats went alone with social justice garbage to avoid being dragged as the first one to stop clapping for Stalin. Now the Social justice warriors have dragged the party so far left that voters in San Francisco are sick to death of their nonsense.
The 2022 midterms offer an opportunity for a once-in-a-generation realignment election as big or bigger than 1994. Republican candidates at every level have a duty to highlight and vigorously oppose the entire panoply of social justice bullshit: Critical Race Theory, police defunding, tranny madness, queer education for elementary school children, antifa riots, school mask mandates. Tie every one of those woke anchors around the necks of Democratic incumbents and relentlessly pound away at them between now and November. Send flyers highlighting the lunacy to every black and Hispanic parent in America. Conduct outreach to every Asian family to remind them that Democrats are just fine with quotas that keep their children out of the college of their choice with racist quotas. Send out a thousand Scott Presslers to register outraged parents as Republicans and get them out to vote.
And once we win, blast every institution infected with social justice down to bedrock, purge the woke and rebuild from scratch.
Clean sweep.
Hard reboot.
No quarter.
One last bit: “In June, voters will decide whether to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s far-left district attorney.”
