MATT MARGOLIS: If This Is True, Democrats Are in Real Trouble for Years to Come. “Democrats’ virtual monopoly on the minority vote is collapsing.”
Archive for 2022
September 10, 2022
A DEADLY RELIGION: The Dangerous Rise of Carbon Fundamentalism.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Apple Watch Series 7 Smart watch. #CommissionEarned
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (RUSSIA EDITION): Russia Routed in Kharkiv Counteroffensive. “Kyiv was somehow able to achieve operational-level surprise, sucker-punching Russia in the north (and even the east) while feinting to the south. The historical masters of deception were completely deceived. Books will be written about how Ukraine managed to pull that off.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Amazon Sellers See ‘scary’ Holiday Season As Consumers Pull Back.
Amazon.com Inc. sellers are bracing for a bleak holiday shopping season as inflation-bitten consumers curb their spending.
Many merchants, who sell more than half of the goods on Amazon’s web store, fear they’ll be forced to cut prices to move a mountain of unsold inventory. It’s an abrupt change from the previous two years when sellers scrambled to get enough products into Amazon warehouses to meet pandemic-fueled demand even as chronic shortages let them jack up prices.
This year US online sales will rise just 9.4% to $1 trillion, the first time growth has slipped into the single digits, according to Insider Intelligence, which in June lowered its earlier annual forecast. Spending on Amazon will hit $400 billion, up 9% and slower than the overall industry, the research firm says.
“Consumers don’t seem to be spending much on anything beyond basic necessities, so sellers have to offer discounts and coupons and aggressive marketing, which can be expensive,” said Lesley Hensell, a co-founder of Riverbend Consulting, which advises Amazon sellers. “The fourth quarter looks scary this year.”
‘Christmas dinner in a can’ sales should be brisk this year!
ANN ALTHOUSE ON THE WASHINGTON POST: It is as if “Animal Farm” had never been written. “The problem is the use of criminal law against political speech, and this isn’t a distinctively Chinese idea. . . . Oh! Imagine taking a statute that just happens to be on the books and enforcing it. But here in America, elite writers are deploying the word ‘sedition’ and eyeing the sedition laws that we have on the books.”
Some Grand Inquisitors are more equal than others.
Plus: “The author of the June column ‘The sedition didn’t stop on Jan. 6. It must be stopped’ and the first person on the list of ‘Members of the Editorial Board’ — found at the bottom of the editorial about the Hong Kong sedition trial — are the same person: Karen Tumulty.”
DESTINATION: Why is NASA returning to the moon? Joe Pappalardo on the Artemis program, the future of U.S. spaceflight, and the beginnings of a new space race:
It may be unfair to compare SpaceX and NASA, but SpaceX is built to be fast-but-risky whereas NASA is built to be slow-but-reliable. We’re now seeing that the fast-but-risky approach is actually leading to not only faster but more reliable results. Artemis is this giant U.S. government program that leaks money—as the Apollo program was—and that seems antiquated, but lots of members of Congress could get behind its traditional approach, which made use of languishing NASA facilities and had a supply chain stretching into lots of different communities. There are real benefits to NASA doing work across these communities, of course, but this approach can get in the way of doing things quickly, being able to change direction when engineers learn something new, or being free to adopt new technology and machinery. There’s less flexibility. And the Space Launch System isn’t reusable, either, meaning it’s a costly rocket that can only be used once. It would be foolish to stop this program now, but it would be grossly irresponsible to replicate it in the future.
Read the whole thing.
GALILEO COULDN’T PASS PEER REVIEW AT NATURE TODAY: And Yet It Moves. Once the most respected scientific journal in the world, Nature announces that it now places political correctness above the search for truth. The Left’s war on science proceeds.
ARE YOU EVEN ALLOWED TO SAY THIS NOW? Computer Experts: Ditch Georgia’s Voting Machnes. “An independent panel of experts on computer systems and election security issues has concluded a lengthy investigation into the voting systems currently in place in the state of Georgia and sent recommendations to the State Election Board and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The current system primarily relies on touchscreen voting machines produced by Dominion Voting Systems. The audit must not have gone very well because they advise that the state discontinue the use of the Dominion machines and move immediately to hand-marked paper ballots.”
I’ve been pushing paper ballots since 2002.
Flashback, November 2, 2020: Will your ballot be safe? Computer experts sound warnings on America’s voting machines.
Millions of voters going to the polls Tuesday will cast their ballots on machines blasted as unreliable and inaccurate for two decades by computer scientists from Princeton University to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Toyed with by white-hat hackers and targeted for scathing reviews from secretaries of state in California and Ohio, Direct Recording Electronic voting systems, or DREs, have startled Illinois voters by flashing the word “Republican” at the top of a ballot and forgotten what day it was in South Carolina. They were questioned in the disappearance of 12,000 votes in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, in 2002 and 18,000 votes in Sarasota County, Florida, in 2006. . . .
All election systems are for the most part black boxes: proprietary software and hardware jealously guarded by the handful of companies selling them. But state reviews and court cases opening up DRE systems of all makes and models for examination have for years flagged problems.
In New Jersey in 2008, Princeton computer scientist Andrew Appel and a five-member team got a rare look under the hood of an AVC Advantage DRE, part of a lawsuit alleging DREs could not reliably count votes
Among the findings: The system sometimes only seemed to record a vote. It sometimes did record a vote but seemed not to. It would take one screwdriver and seven minutes to insert a vote-stealing program. That kind of hack would probably be invisible, Appel concluded.
Plus: Democrats question election results: ‘We just trust the machines, and we shouldn’t.’
Matt Luceen didn’t vote for former President Donald Trump in 2020, but he came to Washington last week to protest President Biden’s inauguration, saying the election was flawed.
Mr. Luceen, a supporter of Sen. Bernard Sanders, said he toted signs that read “COUNT OUR VOTES BY HAND,” and “End the charade.”
“We don’t ever really put the paper into piles and count them by hand anymore,” the 34-year-old computer programmer said. “We just trust the machines, and we shouldn’t because we have documented proof that these machines are vulnerable.”
While Mr. Trump and his supporters have been explosively vocal about their distrust of the election system, discontent runs through a broad swath of voters from across the political spectrum.
In 2016, it was Democrats complaining that the election had been tainted by Russian interference. Two years later, the party complained that Stacey Abrams had been denied the Georgia governorship because of shenanigans with voting rolls.
Ms. Abrams never conceded, and Democrats — who took control of the U.S. House in those 2018 elections — made her cause a rallying cry, vowing to repair elections.
In 2020, it was Mr. Trump sowing complaints early and often.
And remember this? Democratic senators warned of potential ‘vote switching’ by Dominion voting machines prior to 2020 election.
In a December 2019 letter to Dominion Voting Systems, which has been mired in controversy after a human error involving its machines in Antrim County, Michigan, resulted in incorrect counts, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Amy Klobuchar and congressman Mark Pocan warned about reports of machines “switching votes,” “undisclosed vulnerabilities,” and “improbable” results that “threaten the integrity of our elections.”
“In 2018 alone, ‘voters in South Carolina [were] reporting machines that switched their votes after they’d inputted them, scanners [were] rejecting paper ballots in Missouri, and busted machines [were] causing long lines in Indiana,’” the letter reads. “In addition, researchers recently uncovered previously undisclosed vulnerabilities in “nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states.” And, just this year, after the Democratic candidate’s electronic tally showed he received 164 votes out of 55,000 cast in a Pennsylvania state judicial election in 2019, the county’s Republican chairwoman said, “nothing went right on Election Day. Everything went wrong. That’s a problem.”
The letter continued: “These problems threaten the integrity of our elections and demonstrate the importance of election systems that are strong, durable, and not vulnerable to attack.”
Dominion sued Rudy Giuliani, but not these Democrats. But an “unbiased” voting machine company that only sues Republicans has kind of blown its credibility already.
PUTIN’S WAR: In Major Advance, Ukraine Drives Russians Out of Key Eastern City.
Ukrainian forces seized most of a strategically vital city in northeastern Ukraine on Saturday, cutting the main supply line to thousands of Russian troops near the eastern city of Izyum and marking the biggest strategic gain Ukraine has made since the start of an offensive this week.
Photos from Russian and Ukrainian channels on Telegram showed Ukrainian soldiers holding the country’s flag in front of the city hall in Kupyansk, and Kremlin-loyal Russian military correspondents said Moscow’s forces had pulled back across the Oskil River to the eastern part of the city.
The Kupyansk rail and road hub located in the western half of the city was the last artery connecting Russia with thousands of troops on territory that represented the bulk of Russia’s gains in May and June. Ukraine’s control of the road network also threatens Russia’s hold on Izyum, a city Moscow had planned to use to launch further attacks on Ukrainian-controlled parts of the Donetsk region in the country’s east.
VodkaPundit readers got a heads-up yesterday on the importance of Kupyansk.
SOMEBODY SHOULD TELL BIDEN HE’S PRESIDENT, NOT TRUMP: To listen to Democrats in recent weeks, according to The Lid’s Ari Kaufman, one might think Donald Trump never left the Oval Office.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Dems want the midterms to be a referendum on Trump, not bungling Biden — and the media are compliant.
AARON SIBARIUM: Microsoft Fellowship Caps the Number of White and Asian Applicants.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What is to become of Memphis?
A 247WallSt statistical analysis led them to anoint Memphis as “America’s Deadliest City” for 2021.
1. Memphis, TN-MS-AR
> Violent crime rate: 1,359 per 100,000 people (18,324 total crimes)
> 1-yr. change in violent crime rate: +21.3%
> Homicide rate: 24.2 per 100,000 people (327 total homicides)
> Poverty rate: 15.4%
The Memphis, Tennessee, metro area ranks as the most dangerous city in the United States. More than 18,000 violent crimes were reported in the metro area in 2020, or 1,359 for every 100,000 people — more than three times the U.S. violent crime rate. The number of homicides committed in Memphis climbed by 38%, from 237 in 2019 to 327 in 2020. At 24.2 per 100,000 people, the homicide rate in Memphis is the second highest of any U.S. metro area.
Deadly violence continues to rise in Memphis. The city has reported more homicides so far in 2021 than it had over the comparable period the previous year. City leaders have plans to curtail criminal violence in the city, but reportedly need hundreds more police officers to execute those plans. The department is reportedly offering a $15,000 signing bonus in order to aid in the recruitment effort.
That’s not going to do much for tourism, which used to be a huge part of Memphis’ appeal. I can remember, even in the early 1980s when the city was just starting to get its act together, and Beale Street was a dark hole with Blues Alley/maybe 3 other clubs open and the riverfront was mostly abandoned warehouses, there were still entrepreneurs opening restaurants, smallish music venues, trying to encourage foot traffic from the skyscraper city core (where they’d blocked off a pedestrian section) to the river.
We women Marines would go in a smallish group and really enjoy ourselves. Overton Square was humming with college kids. It had promise, and it came to fruition. (I don’t know what happened. Beale Street now comes up flagged on Yelp as “not safe” along with links for “shoot-out” news reports.)
Fortunately, Memphis authorities know how to turn things around: ‘Real men don’t murder’ ad looks to address crime, teach how to be a man.
‘Don’t lose your head, use your head mane’ — ‘I said mane because, in Memphis, that means man. Problem is, a lot of y’all ain’t even that. Having a gun doesn’t make you a man.’
This is just a piece of a new public service announcement, with the same message from three years ago.
Since the last public service announcement, the homicide numbers have continued to increase, according to a previous search done by the University of Memphis.
Howard Robertson, CEO of Trust Marketing and Communications, said according to research done by the university, the homicide numbers have continued to increase, since the last public service announcement.
He said, that’s a reflection of how effective the messaging is, especially for young men, and the conversations start with current inmates.
“They had issues with manhood, fatherhood, with their own fathers who in most cases were not around, and who they blame for not teaching them how to be a man.”
The above article is dated December 30th, 2021. Curiously, that campaign didn’t have much of an affect on Wednesday’s Facebook shooter: Police Arrest Memphis Driver Who Shot at People While Streaming on Facebook.
BILL OTIS: Our under-incarceration problem.
MICHAEL CRESWELL: On the racial achievement gap.
JOHNNY ROTTEN COMES FULL CIRCLE: Ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon Quotes Traditional ‘God Save The Queen’ In Tribute To Elizabeth II.
“Send her victorious” is a quote from Britain’s national anthem “God Save The Queen”:
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the Queen.The sentiment is a long way from the Pistols’ headline-making hit “God Save the Queen,” which became a punk anthem (and national scandal) with lyrics like, “God save the Queen/She ain’t no human being” and “God save the queen/’Cause tourists are money/And our figurehead/Is not what she seems.”
The song was released in 1977 during Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. The BBC banned it, adding to its infamy.
Lydon’s turnabout isn’t quite so shocking, though, to anyone who has been keeping up with the Public Limited Ltd. singer — he’s long expressed his personal fondness for the Queen. In a 2017 interview with UK music site The Quietus, Lydon said he dreaded the inevitable use of the Sex Pistols song when the Queen dies.
The song, he said, was “about a political situation and the demand for obedience to a monarchy I don’t believe in. But she’s a human being and I will sorely miss her as a human being on Planet Earth. It’s not her fault she was born into a gilded cage. Long may she live.”
It’s probably the most punk rock thing ever to act like an adult over the queen’s passing, when academics and talk show hosts are using her death as a platform for cliched rants about racism and colonialism:
● Twitter pulls vile tweet by Carnegie Mellon’s critical race theory professor who said she hoped Queen died ‘an excruciating death’ — after Jeff Bezos led avalanche of condemnation.
● ‘GENOCIDAL EMPIRE:’ View co-host claims Queen Elizabeth wore ‘crown with pillaged stones.’
● The ignorance of Queen Elizabeth’s ‘anti-colonialist’ critics.
LEARNING FROM THE OBERLIN VERDICT: “Such a large amount is certainly going to make institutions around the country take notice, and to be very careful about the difference between supporting students and being part of a cause. It wasn’t so much the students speaking; it’s the institution accepting that statement uncritically. Sometimes you have to take a step back.”
AS A LEGENDARY COMMUNITY ORGANIZER ADVISES, GET IN THEIR FACES AND PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Boise Pride Backs Down, Cancels Controversial ‘Drag Kids’ Performance As More Sponsors Pull Out. At least six sponsors have dropped out of Boise Pride Festival due to concerns over performance involving minors
RESPECT FOR MARRIAGE ACT HAS NONE FOR 1ST AMENDMENT: Senators Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and James Lankford of Oklahoma, plus multiple civil liberties advocates who specialize in freedom of speech and religion issues, say Schumer’s same-sex marriage vehicle is jam-packed with destructiveness.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: SC Democrats want their own Senate candidate to drop out.
TIM GRAHAM: Karine Jean-Pierre Easily Tagged As An ‘Election Denier.’
The central hypocrisy of President Biden’s indictment of the “MAGA Republicans” – as well as the Pelosi-picked panel on January 6 – is all the evidence of liberals and Democrats being “election deniers.” Democracy is crumbling when Republicans question election results, but everything Democrats say and do should be categorized as exercises in idealism.
n the September 6 Biden press briefing, Fox White House reporter Peter Doocy started to point out what press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted in 2016. She said “Oh, I knew this was coming.” Doocy said “You tweeted Trump stole an election. You tweeted Brian Kemp stole an election. If denying election results is extreme now, why wasn’t it then?”
On December 17, 2016, almost six weeks after Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton, Jean-Pierre tweeted, “Stolen emails, stolen drone, stolen election…..welcome to the world of #unpresidented Trump.”
On April 2, 2020 – about 17 months after Stacey Abrams lost her election in Georgia – Jean-Pierre tweeted over an MSNBC video link: “Reminder: Brian Kemp stole the gubernatorial election from Georgians and Stacey Abrams.” Why so late? Liberals at that time were suggesting Kemp (like Trump) was one of those GOP COVID mass murderers.
Jean-Pierre tried to call the comparison “ridiculous,” that “I was talking specifically at that time of what was happening with voting rights and the — what was in danger of voting rights.” That changes absolutely nothing. The hypocrisy remains. The only leg these liberals have to stand on is they didn’t riot at the Capitol. They spent most of Trump’s presidency treating him as a Russian-imposed fraud, but that’s somehow not being a dangerous “election denier.”
Conservatives quickly pointed out the obvious: if the press secretary had long anticipated this question, why was the answer so remarkably insufficient?
Democrats and denying elections — it’s different when they do it, somehow: