“You don’t have an army. You’ve got 500 marxists in mom’s basement.”

April 5th, 2016

TL:DR Summary: Social Justice Warriors tried to pull their usual social justice warrior thing, in this case trying to get a presenter for a programming conference called LambdaConf kicked off because he said politically incorrect things on his blog. LambdaConf told them, far too politely, to get stuffed. So next the SJW managed to pressure some sponsors into pulling out. In response, conference organizers put up an Indigopop appeal to make up the funding shortfall and support free speech.

Result: They reached their funding goal in one day.

Rather than deploy my own snark, I’m going to lazily embedded ClarkHat’s far more deliciously pointed Tweets on the same subject:

But I have to thank the SJW things for one thing: Without them, it might have been a while before I delved into Urbit, the project of the guy they want to ban. It’s completely off the hook, utterly bonkers and probably entirely feasible. It’s halfway between early open source goals and something out of a Greg Egan novel. Here’s an early look at same from ClarkHat,

(Hat tip: Borepatch.)

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Posted in Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

Milo Explains It All For You

April 4th, 2016

And by “all” I mean two different things. First, here’s Milo Yiannopoulos why it’s so important to beat the Social Justice Warriors now at the peak of their powers:

Second, here’s Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari’s very interesting piece “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right.” Interesting, in that the authors attempt to lay out the various strands of the so-called “Alt-Right,” but not necessarily persuasive.

It is very informative as to identifying various alt-Right clades from Twitter trends, comments trolls, and other online venues. However, nothing in the piece really explains how Donald Trump is capturing some 37% of Republican primary voters down in the wilds of meatspace. In that context, I am especially unconvinced that those the authors finger as “natural conservatives” think about cultural issues in the way the piece suggest they do. “Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters.” While I am sure a fair number of Trump voters are indeed resentful of a national elite media that paints them as the redneck freaks of JesusLand, I would be greatly surprised if they give terribly much thought about symphonies and basilicas compared to economic insecurity, stagnant wages, and illegal aliens taking jobs away from Americans.

Similarly unpersuasive is the authors’ implied definition of “Establishment Conservatives.” As someone who has occasionally written for National Review and is backing Ted Cruz over Trump, I suppose I theoretically fit the definition. But this taxonomy (and the piece itself) completely ignores the Tea Party and its alternate media organs, lumping together everyone from David Brock to Ron Paul into some sort of amorphous political mass.

The piece is still worth reading, but with several grains of salt.

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Posted in Republicans, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

Putin and the Panama Papers

April 3rd, 2016

Here’s a potentially huge scandal that’s just unfolding now:

An unprecedented leak of more than 11 million documents, called the “Panama Papers”, has revealed the hidden financial dealings of some of the world’s wealthiest people, as well as 12 current and former world leaders and 128 more politicians and public officials around the world.

More than 200,000 companies, foundations and trusts are contained in the leak of information which came from a little-known but powerful law firm based in Panama called Mossack Fonseca, whose files include the offshore holdings of drug dealers, Mafia members, corrupt politicians and tax evaders – and wrongdoing galore.

The law firm is one of the world’s top creators of shell companies, which can be legally used to hide the ownership of assets. The data includes emails, contracts, bank records, property deeds, passport copies and other sensitive information dating from 1977 to as recently as December 2015.

It allows a never-before-seen view inside the offshore world — providing a day-to-day, decade-by-decade look at how dark money flows through the global financial system, breeding crime and stripping national treasuries of tax revenues.

There’s 2.6 terrabytes of data released, including Donald Trump’s favorite Russian dictator:

The most extraordinary allegations in the archive revolve around Putin’s closest associates, including Sergey Roldugin, a close friend since the late 1970s when Putin was a young KGB agent.

Roldugin is a cellist for the St Petersburg orchestra, yet his name appears as the owner of offshore companies that have rights to loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A Russian news service report in 2010 disclosed that he owned at least three per cent of Bank Rossiya, Russia’s most important bank.

When Mossack Fonseca helped open a bank account in Switzerland on behalf of Roldugin, the application form asked if he had “any relation to PEPs (politically exposed persons) or VIPs.”

The one-word answer was, “No.” Yet, Roldugin is godfather to Putin’s daughter Mariya.

“Roldugin is, by his proximity to a serving head of state, clearly an exposed person,” Mark Pieth, a former head of the Swiss justice ministry’s organized crime division, told the ICIJ team.

The documents show how in 2008 a company controlled by Roldugin had influence over Russia’s largest truck maker Kamaz, joining with several other offshore companies to help another Putin insider acquire majority control of the company. They wanted foreign investment, and German carmaker Daimler later that year bought a 10 per cent stake in Kamaz for $250 million.

The offshore company that connects many Putin loyalists is Sandalwood Continental Limited in the British Virgin Islands. Roldugin was a shareholder until 2012, as was Oleg Gordin, a little-known businessman whom incorporation documents describe as linked to “law enforcement agencies.”

The files also mention a company co-owned by Putin friend Yury Kovalchuk, the largest shareholder of Bank Rossiya. Kovalchuk was among those targeted by US sanctions in 2014 in retribution for Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Another friend, Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s judo partner and a billionaire construction mogul, openly obtained companies through Mossack Fonseca. The US Treasury Department, when sanctioning him in 2014, suggested that the oligarch acted on behalf of “a senior official.”

That was widely believed to mean Putin, whose fingerprints were not on any offshore company.

The fact that Putin is lining the pockets of himself and his cronies is hardly shocking, but having concrete proof of it is a different thing altogether.

Strangely, the web page for the papers run by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists‎, doesn’t seem to have any Americans fingered by the papers yet. There’s a good chance that could change.

Developing…

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Posted in Crime, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

LinkSwarm for April 1, 2016

April 1st, 2016

Happy April Fools day! No tricks here, just the usual Friday LinkSwarm:

  • ObamaCare didn’t do jack to lower costs. (Hat tip Instapundit.)
  • Indeed, Obamacare is the fail that keeps failing: “As a result of the ACA, between 4 million and 9 million fewer people are projected to have employment-based coverage each year from 2017 through 2026 than would have had such coverage if the ACA had never been enacted.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Great news! The Nigerian Army has rescued rescued 800 Boko Haram hostages. That’s compared to the number of those hostages rescued by the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, which is (stops, counts, carries the one) Zero.
  • Bad news: They just kidnapped 300 more. (Hat tip: Weasel Zippers.)
  • Following the Brussels attack, the standard ruling class rituals of aversion are in full bloom.
  • Donald Trump suggested targeting the families of terrorists. Putin’s Russia does exactly that.
  • The Obama Administration treats Little Sisters of the Poor worse than Exxon, Visa and Pepsi, all of whom have health plans lacking the abortion mandate. Then again, as Instapundit noted: “To be fair, that was basically because they hate those groups and wanted to punish them.”
  • Xi Jinping has accumulated more power than any leader since Mao. “He has been fighting dissent with even more ruthlessness than he has been waging war on graft. Not since the dark days after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 has there been such a sweeping crackdown on critics of the party.”
  • Belgium’s current crises sounds an awful lot like where California is headed: Expensive government that’s congenitally incapable of solving problems.
  • Canadian bank depositors are now officially at risk of bail-ins.
  • David Brin says the Amendment that most protects the right of citizens to film interactions with the police is the Sixth.
  • Rob Ford was more than just a loud-mouth drunk. “Ford was a political pragmatist who simply didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about him other than his constituents. It was that gumption that endeared him to hundreds of thousands of Torontonians.”
  • Supergenius New Yorker writer thinks Arizona is next to Texas.

    Screen shot 2016-03-23 at 10.56.52 PM

    (Screen shot has been included because the article has been edited and no notice made of the deleted error.)

  • Illegal alien rapes 12-year old. (Hat tip: Director Blue.
  • Lake Travis hits full again.
  • “Hulk Hogan may have just destroyed Gawker.” Well, we can only hope…
  • Lunatic hoplophobe associate professor of English calls 911 to report ROTC maneuvers on campus at the University of North Dakota. (Hat tip: Tam.)
  • Old and Busted: The Suicide Prevention Hotline. The New Hotness: The Suicide Encouragement Hotline. Not an April Fools joke, alas…
  • Why grackles love supermarket parking lots.

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    Posted in Austin, Communism, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, ObamaCare, Welfare State | No Comments »

    Texas vs. California Update for March 31, 2016

    March 31st, 2016

    Lots of Texas vs. California linky goodness, much of it via Jack Dean at Pension Tsunami, who’s been emailing me links of significant interest.

  • Texas continues to grow:

    As last week’s US Census Bureau population estimates indicated, the story of population growth between 2014 and 2015 was largely about Texas, as it has been for the decade starting 2010 (See: “Texas Keeps Getting Bigger” The New Metropolitan Area Estimates). The same is largely true with respect to population trends in the nation’s largest counties, with The Lone Star state dominating both in the population growth and domestic migration among 135 counties with more than 500,000 population.

    Snip.

    Houston, which is the fastest growing major metropolitan area (over 1 million population) in the nation includes the two fastest growing large counties. Fort Bend County added 4.29 percent to its population between 2014 and 2015 and now has 716,000 residents. Montgomery County grew 3.57 percent to 538,000. In addition to these two suburban Houston counties, Harris County, the core County ranked 16th in growth, adding 2.03 percent to its population and exceeding 4.5 million population.

    Dallas-Fort Worth, the second fastest-growing major metropolitan area has two counties among the top 20. The third fastest-growing county is Denton (located north of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport), which added 3.42 percent to its population over the past year and now has 781,000 residents. Collin County, to the north of Dallas County, grew 3.17 percent and now stands at 914,000 residents. Its current growth rate would put Collin County over 1 million population by the 2020 census.

    Travis County, with its county seat of Austin, grew 2.22 percent to 1,177,000 and ranked 12th. Bexar County, centered on San Antonio grew 2.01 percent and ranks 17th.

    Overall, Texas had four of the five fastest growing large counties, and seven of the top twenty. California had none. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • The Austin metropolitan area passes 2 million people.
  • The California Policy Center has a devestating roundup of what’s wrong with California’s economy. To wit:
    • “A now has by far the nation’s highest state income tax rate. We are 34% higher than 2nd place Oregon, and a heck of a lot higher than all the rest”
    • “CA has the highest state sales tax rate in the nation. 7.5% (does not include local sales taxes).”
    • “California in 2015 ranked 14th highest in per capita property taxes (including commercial) – the only major tax where we are not in the worst ten states. But the 2014 average CA single-family residence (SFR) property tax is the 8th highest state in the nation. Indeed, the median CA homeowner property tax bill is 93% higher than the average for the other 49 states.”
    • “California has a nasty anti-small business $800 minimum corporate income tax, even if no profit is earned, and even for many nonprofits. Next highest state is Rhode Island at $500 (only for “C” corporations). 3rd is Delaware at $175. Most states are at zero.”
    • “California’s 2015 ‘business tax climate’ ranks 3rd worst in the nation – behind New York and anchor-clanker New Jersey. In addition, CA has a lock on the worst rank in the Small Business Tax Index – a whopping 8.3% worse than 2nd worst state.”
    • “The American Tort Reform Foundation in 2015 again ranks CA the ‘worst state judicial hellhole’ in U.S. – the most anti-business.”
    • “CA public school teachers the 3rd highest paid in the nation. CA students rank 48th in math achievement, 49th in reading.”
    • “California’s real poverty rate (the new census bureau standard adjusted for COL) is easily the worst in the nation at 23.4%. We are 57.3% higher than the average for the other 49 states.”
    • “Of 100 U.S. real estate markets, in 2013 CA contained by far the least affordable middle class housing market (San Francisco). PLUS the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th.”

    It’s like a whole bunch of Texas vs. California roundup statistics all in one big green ball of fail. Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • “California’s 50% [minimum wage] increase would eliminate nearly 700,000 jobs—which means higher unemployment for the poor and least skilled in particular.”
  • Why did Carl’s Jr. flee California? Taxes, regulations and lawsuits.

    CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Puzder told the Wall Street Journal in 2013, “California is not interested in having businesses grow.”

    The article points out that many factors, including local building regulations, make one community less desirable than another for businesses.

    For example, it takes 60 days in Texas, 63 in Shanghai, and 125 in Novosibirsk, Russia for one of CKE’s restaurants to get a building permit after signing a lease. But in Los Angeles, Ca. it takes a whopping 285 days.

    Puzder added, “I can open up a restaurant faster on Karl Marx Prospect in Siberia than on Carl Karcher Boulevard in California.” The street in California is ironically named for the restaurant chain’s founder.

    California’s labor regulations may also play a role in a company’s desire to seek alternative locations. In that same interview with WSJ, Puzder said his company had spent $20 million in the state over the past eight years on damages and attorney fees related to class-action lawsuits.

    (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)

  • Justice Scalia’s death dooms the Friedrichs vs. California Teacher’s Association lawsuit.
  • “If a Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research’s estimate is accurate, public pension debt in California is even worse than feared. Preliminary calculations from a forthcoming SIEPR study peg the unfunded retirement tab for state and local government employees at more than $1.2 trillion.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Texas unemployment rates drops to 4.4%.
  • San Bernardino’s bondholders get screwed so the bankrupt city can continue sending money to CalPERS. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • California’s colleges are so money-hungry they’re screwing in-state students out of admissions so they can charge more to out-of-state applicants, including those who wouldn’t normally be able to get in. Sort of like the UT admissions scandal, but less politically connected and more widespread and money-grubbing… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • But there’s one type of student California admissions isn’t keeping out: antisemites. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Even the supposed beneficiaries of California’s high speed rail fantasy have become disillusioned with it.
  • A hot relocation to Texas rumor just in: “Plano – new home of Toyota Motor’s North American headquarters – has been mentioned as a possible relocation site for a Wichita-based subsidiary of conglomerate Cargill.”

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Economics, Supreme Court, Texas, unions, Welfare State | 3 Comments »

    Legendary Nazi Commando Otto Skorzeny Was Secretly a Hitman for Mossad

    March 30th, 2016

    This is a pretty amazing story:

    On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.

    The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.

    HaBoker, a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation: The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.

    But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.

    We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.

    Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.

    Skorzeny really was that scary a badass, and late in the war many allies feared that he would be leading “werewolf” guerrilla forces against the occupation of Germany, which never really materialized.

    You can read more about him here, though that site might possibly be out on the fringe (in more ways than one).

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    Posted in Military | No Comments »

    Scott Walker Endorses Ted Cruz

    March 29th, 2016

    This won’t hurt Ted Cruz’s chances:

    Washington (CNN)Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker formally endorsed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday, saying he is “a strong new leader” and “constitutional conservative.”

    “After all these years of the Obama-Clinton failures, it’s time we elect a strong new leader and I’ve chosen to endorse Ted Cruz,” Walker told conservative radio host Charlie Sykes on Newsradio 620 WTMJ Tuesday.

    If you asked me in 2015 who I think had the best chance of winning the Republican nomination, I would have said it was Walker, given how how handily he beat the unions in the Wisconsin recall. Shows you how much I know…

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans | No Comments »

    Hillary’s Email Scandal: Worse Than You Thought

    March 29th, 2016

    The Washington Post has a long piece up on how Hillary Clinton’s private email server scandal unfolded. Though quite restrained by the standards of the blogsphere, it paints a devastating portrait of Clinton and her aides not only blithely unconcerned about security, but plotting to bypass security and accountability from the get-go:

    Hillary Clinton began preparing to use the private basement server after President Obama picked her to be his secretary of state in November 2008. The system was already in place. It had been set up for former president Bill Clinton, who used it for personal and Clinton Foundation business.

    On Jan. 13, 2009, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton registered a private email domain for Hillary Clinton, clintonemail.com, that would allow her to send and receive email through the server.

    Snip.

    They were aware of a speech delivered by Joel F. Brenner, then chief of counterintelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, on Feb. 24 at a hotel in Vienna, Va., a State Department document shows. Brenner urged his audience to consider what could have happened to them during a visit to the recent Beijing Olympics.

    “Your phone or BlackBerry could have been tagged, tracked, monitored and exploited between your disembarking the airplane and reaching the taxi stand at the airport,” Brenner said. “And when you emailed back home, some or all of the malware may have migrated to your home server. This is not hypothetical.”

    At the time, Clinton had just returned from an official trip that took her to China and elsewhere in Asia. She was embarking on another foray to the Middle East and Europe. She took her BlackBerry with her.

    Snip.

    Few could have known it, but the email system operated in those first two months without the standard encryption generally used on the Internet to protect communication, according to an independent analysis that Venafi Inc., a cybersecurity firm that specializes in the encryption process, took upon itself to publish on its website after the scandal broke.

    Not until March 29, 2009 — two months after Clinton began using it — did the server receive a “digital certificate” that protected communication over the Internet through encryption, according to Venafi’s analysis.

    It is unknown whether the system had some other way to encrypt the email traffic at the time. Without encryption — a process that scrambles communication for anyone without the correct key — email, attachments and passwords are transmitted in plain text.

    “That means that anyone could have accessed it. Anyone,” Kevin Bocek, vice president of threat intelligence at Venafi, told The Post.

    The Post piece is well worth reading, even if it avoids the conclusion already drawn by everyone not already a Hillary Clinton backer: She set up a private server to avoid legal accountability while doing back-channel deals with foreign powers that directly benefited herself, the Clinton Foundation (but I repeat myself), her friends and cronies.

    Then there’s this: “Because Clinton did not use desktop computers, she relied on her personal BlackBerry.” Wait, a high ranking government official in the 21st century “doesn’t use personal computers”? Who is she, your grandmother that complains she can’t play solitaire because you closed the games directory on Windows 95?

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy | No Comments »

    .50 BMG vs. Peeps

    March 27th, 2016

    Enjoy this traditional Easter offering of a .50 BMG round vs. a long row of Peeps. It’s hardly a fair fight…

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    Posted in Guns, video | No Comments »

    Bomb Blast Targeting Christians in Lahore Pakistan Kills 56

    March 27th, 2016

    Another day, another Jihad suicide bombing:

    An explosion ripped through a crowded Pakistan park where Christians were celebrating Easter on Sunday, killing at least 56 people, officials told AFP.

    About 150 people were injured when a suicide bomber detonated explosives in the parking area of Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park in the eastern city of Lahore, officials told Reuters.

    The explosion reportedly occurred just outside the exit gate and near rides for children.

    A police superintendent told Reuters most of the dead were women and children.

    The Pakistani ISI has supported jihad as an instrument of state policy since at least the creation of the Taliban. It’s tempting to call the increasing number of in-country jihad attacks as blow-back, except I’m not entirely sure how much (if any) the ISI and their deep state allies really care about the deaths of Pakistani Christians…

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    Posted in Jihad | 1 Comment »

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