At Der Spiegel, "'World War III Has Already Effectively Begun'."
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Leather Laptop Messenger Bag Vintage Briefcase Satchel
A beautiful item, and deal of the day.
Here, Leather Laptop Messenger Bag Vintage Briefcase Satchel for Men and Women (VINTAGE BROWN) 18 inch.
Friday, October 28, 2022
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water
At Amazon, Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
Fucking Idiot Tom Brady Announces Divorce from Smokin' Supermodel Gisele Bundchen
The man's a blazing idiot. Should've stayed retired. Now look at him, a laughingstock, with a 3-5 record in the NFC South.
Brady announced the formal split on Instagram.
Ms. Gisele's announcement is here.
At the Los Angeles Times, "It’s officially over: Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen confirm they’ve finalized divorce."
And at the New York Times, "Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen Say They Have Divorced":
Since they met, Brady, a star quarterback, and Bündchen, a supermodel, have been a high-profile couple, constantly under the public eye. By the time they had met, Brady had already won three Super Bowls with the New England Patriots and Bündchen was one of the most famous people in the world, a fixture on magazine covers and one of the top figures in the fashion industry. In 2016, she was reportedly the world’s highest paid (and richest) model. In the time that they were together, Brady went on to win four more championships, including one with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, with Bündchen often seen supporting him at games and during trophy celebrations...
Most men would practically die to have a woman like Gisele. Their divorce reminds of the that other fucking idiot Ben Affeck, who completely botched it by losing Jennifer Garner, one of the most beautiful women in the world.
I can't with these two. (Rolls eyes.)
Signs of a Red Wave
A good piece, from Erick Erickson, "Forget the Polls. Here Are the Signs of the Red Wave."
Forty-Five Percent of Americans Say They Want a 'Christian Nation'
Hmm.
At Pew Research, "45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a ‘Christian Nation’."
But they hold differing opinions about what that phrase means, and two-thirds of U.S. adults say churches should keep out of politics.
The implication is that Americans want "Christian Nationalism," which is a left-wing boogeyman.
Monday, October 24, 2022
Jackery Portable Power Station Explorer 300, 293Wh Backup Lithium Battery
Prepping for the apocalypse.
Three New Yorkers Ordered Cocaine From the Same Delivery Service. All Died From Fentanyl.
I don't do this stuff. I didn't even know coke was popular these days. And you can order it from a delivery service? Hmm.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Cocaine, long popular among New York professionals, is now often tainted with fentanyl, catching users unprepared and driving drug fatalities":
NEW YORK—Ross Mtangi, a trading executive at Credit Suisse Group AG, left his Manhattan penthouse in March 2021 with his laptop and told his pregnant partner he was going to work. He checked into a nearby hotel and tuned in to work calls. Later, he texted for cocaine from a drug delivery service. A man wearing a baseball cap, cross-body bag and face mask appeared on hotel surveillance. Mr. Mtangi, 40 years old, missed a follow up meeting. His sister and her partner found him dead at the hotel the next day. Police found on a table translucent black baggies that contained lethal fentanyl mixed in with the cocaine. In the East Village, first-year lawyer Julia Ghahramani, 26, texted the same delivery service the same day. She also died. She had just started her career remotely at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. Social worker Amanda Scher, 38, did the same. She died in the Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her Chihuahua-Corgi rescue dog. It was a stone’s throw from where she had received her master’s degree at New York University. The three high-achieving New Yorkers had texted the DoorDash-style cocaine delivery service on a late winter Wednesday. They all died from the illicit fentanyl that had been mixed into it. Fentanyl is a powerful legal opioid, prescribed for cancer patients and others with severe pain. Traffickers have found it is easy and inexpensive to make. The illicit form has spread throughout the illegal drug market, turning up in heroin as well as pills stamped out to look like oxycodone or Adderall and other drugs. Dealers also cut it into cocaine, a stimulant, to be more potent and addictive, introducing the drug to unsuspecting buyers. A tiny amount of fentanyl can kill unseasoned users. “Hey try not to do too much because it’s really strong,” read a text sent to Ms. Scher later that night from the delivery number. Ms. Ghahramani missed seven calls from the number. Sassan Ghahramani, Ms. Ghahramani’s father, said the fentanyl in his daughter’s cocaine was like having cyanide appear in an alcoholic drink during Prohibition. “Julia was a driven professional with everything to live for. Never in a billion years would she have touched anything with fentanyl,” he said. “This is like putting bullets in people’s brains.” ‘Can u come thru?’ March 17 in New York City is usually festive for St. Patrick’s Day. In 2021, the parade was canceled for a second year and most big company offices were shut. Only around 30% of adults in the city had received at least a first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. In the East Village, Ms. Ghahramani, the litigation associate, was one of millions of young Americans starting their career outside of a workplace. She had graduated virtually from Columbia Law School in May 2020 while her parents snapped photos of her and the screen in their Greenwich, Conn., living room. The daughter of Iranian-born Mr. Ghahramani, an investment research firm founder, and Lily Ann Marden, a real estate finance executive, Ms. Ghahramani made a vow in high school to somehow change the world. She helped give pro bono legal advice to immigrants and advocated for gun control. She spoke on the steps of City Hall as a main organizer of a “March for Our Lives” attended by 150,000 following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in February 2018. For much of the pandemic, Ms. Ghahramani retreated to her family’s home to work remotely and spend time with her parents and younger twin siblings. Her final week, Ms. Ghahramani headed back to her Avenue B apartment, saying she had work to do before a family trip the next weekend to celebrate the Persian new year. Ms. Ghahramani told friends and family the workload was intense but that she was loving her first job. On Wednesday, Ms. Ghahramani sent a text to a phone that prosecutors said belonged to the alleged dispatcher for the drug delivery service, Billy Ortega. According to his lawyer, Mr. Ortega was a stay-at-home dad in a house in rural New Jersey. According to prosecutors, Mr. Ortega arranged drug deals from the house. He pleaded not guilty to causing the three deaths and distributing drugs and is awaiting trial. “Can u come thru?,” Ms. Ghahramani wrote. “I’ll send them right now if you want.” “That would be great thank you really appreciate it.” “No worries we family.” After getting the text, prosecutors said, Mr. Ortega asked a courier, Kaylen Rainey, to handle the day’s deliveries. Mr. Ortega sent him Ms. Ghahramani’s address and instructions to collect $200, prosecutors said, citing texts on their phones. Prosecutors said Mr. Rainey lived in an apartment registered to Mr. Ortega’s family in public housing in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. He and another courier rented Zipcars to deliver drugs to neighborhoods across Manhattan, prosecutors alleged, collecting up to thousands of dollars a stop. Mr. Rainey pleaded not guilty to causing the deaths and distributing drugs and is awaiting trial. Nine minutes after the texts, according to police and surveillance footage, Mr. Rainey buzzed Ms. Ghahramani’s apartment bell. Around six hours after the delivery, her phone pinged. “Hey” “Hey you there” Seven calls came in that night and the next morning from the delivery-service number. Ms. Marden woke that morning in Connecticut knowing something was wrong because she hadn’t heard from her daughter. A friend of Ms. Ghahramani went to the apartment and found her dead, holding her phone. Persian pastries she had ordered for the weekend were in the refrigerator. “She made a mistake,” Mr. Ghahramani said. “She had a hit of coke and unbeknownst to her it was loaded with fentanyl and it killed her.” Derailed lives Cocaine has long had allure in New York City, where in the 1980s it became associated with jet setting clubbers and elite professionals. Usage estimates in the city remain higher than the roughly 2% national rate of Americans taking the drug annually for the past two decades. The addition of fentanyl into supplies in the past decade has tripled the yearly number of New Yorkers dying. Of 980 cocaine deaths in 2020, 81% involved fentanyl, according to the most recent New York City health department data. The number of people dying from cocaine alone has held steady in the low hundreds. Drug use overall rose during the pandemic, which derailed work routines and social lives. Fentanyl helped drive total drug fatalities higher. Deaths hit an annual high of 107,521 people in 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up 51% since 2019. Three-quarters of the 2021 deaths involved fentanyl, the CDC said. New York City authorities have been warning of the risks of unknowingly taking fentanyl in cocaine and of its increased presence in cocaine seized by police. Health officials put up posters and sent drink coasters to clubs warning cocaine users to start with a small dose and to have naloxone, an opioid reversal drug, on hand to counter an overdose. They are handing out fentanyl testing strips that can be used to test cocaine and other drugs for fentanyl’s presence. Multiple people died within hours from tainted cocaine in Long Island, N.Y., and in Newport Beach, Calif., last year. Nine were killed in Washington, D.C., in January. Law-enforcement officials said dealers often use coffee grinders or other basic equipment to cut drugs and prepare them for sale, which can result in deadly batches...
Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated.
At the New York Times, "The white majority is fading, the economy is changing and there’s a pervasive sense of loss in districts where Republicans fought the outcome of the 2020 election":
When Representative Troy Nehls of Texas voted last year to reject Donald J. Trump’s electoral defeat, many of his constituents back home in Fort Bend County were thrilled. Like the former president, they have been unhappy with the changes unfolding around them. Crime and sprawl from Houston, the big city next door, have been spilling over into their once bucolic towns. (“Build a wall,” Mr. Nehls likes to say, and make Houston pay.) The county in recent years has become one of the nation’s most diverse, where the former white majority has fallen to just 30 percent of the population. Don Demel, a 61-year-old salesman who turned out last month to pick up a signed copy of a book by Mr. Nehls about the supposedly stolen election, said his parents had raised him “colorblind.” But the reason for the discontent was clear: Other white people in Fort Bend “did not like certain people coming here,” he said. “It’s race. They are old-school.” A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power. The portion of white residents dropped about 35 percent more over the last three decades in those districts than in territory represented by other Republicans, the analysis found, and constituents also lagged behind in income and education. Rates of so-called deaths of despair, such as suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver failure, were notably higher as well. Although overshadowed by the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the House vote that day was the most consequential of Mr. Trump’s ploys to overturn the election. It cast doubt on the central ritual of American democracy, galvanized the party’s grass roots around the myth of a stolen victory and set a precedent that legal experts — and some Republican lawmakers — warn could perpetually embroil Congress in choosing a president. To understand the social forces converging in that historic vote — objecting to the Electoral College count — The Times examined the constituencies of the lawmakers who joined the effort, analyzing census and other data from congressional districts and interviewing scores of residents and local officials. The Times previously revealed the back-room maneuvers inside the House, including convincing lawmakers that they could reject the results without explicitly endorsing Mr. Trump’s outlandish fraud claims. Many of the 139 objectors, including Mr. Nehls, said they were driven in part by the demands of their voters. “You sent me to Congress to fight for President Trump and election integrity,” Mr. Nehls wrote in a tweet on Jan. 5, 2021, “and that’s exactly what I am doing.” At a Republican caucus meeting a few days later, Representative Bill Johnson, from an Ohio district stretching into Appalachia, told colleagues that his constituents would “go ballistic” with “raging fire” if he broke with Mr. Trump, according to a recording. Certain districts primarily reflect either the racial or socioeconomic characteristics. But the typical objector district shows both — a fact demographers said was striking. Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters. “A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to protect their status.” That may help explain why the dispute over Mr. Trump’s defeat has emerged at this moment in history, with economic inequality reaching new heights and the white population of the United States expected within about two decades to lose its majority. Many of the objectors’ districts started with a significantly larger Black minority, or had a rapid increase in the Hispanic population, making the decline in the white population more pronounced. Of the 12 Republican-held districts that swung to minority white — almost all in California and Texas — 10 were represented by objectors. The most significant drops occurred in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs and California desert towns, where the white percentage fell by more than a third. Lawmakers who objected were also overrepresented among the 70 Republican-held districts with the lowest percentages of college graduates. In one case — the southeast Kentucky district of Hal Rogers, currently the longest-serving House member — about 14 percent of residents had four-year degrees, less than half the average in the districts of Republicans who accepted the election results. Many residents say they have lost faith in political leaders — except for former President Donald J. Trump. Montgomery County, Va., is in one of the country’s poorest congressional districts. Many residents say they have lost faith in political leaders — except for former President Donald J. Trump.Credit...Laura Saunders for The New York Times While Mr. Nehls’s district exemplifies demographic change, Representative H. Morgan Griffith’s in southwest Virginia is among the poorest in the country. Once dominated by coal, manufacturing and tobacco, the area’s economic base eroded with competition from new energy sources and foreign importers. Doctors prescribed opioids to injured laborers and an epidemic of addiction soon followed. Residents, roughly 90 percent of them white, gripe that the educated elites of the Northern Virginia suburbs think that “the state stops at Roanoke.” They take umbrage at what they consider condescension from outsiders who view their communities as poverty-stricken, and they bemoan “Ph.D pollution” from the big local university, Virginia Tech. After a long history of broken government promises, many said in interviews they had lost faith in the political process and public institutions — in almost everyone but Mr. Trump, who they said championed their cause. Marie March, a restaurant owner in the town of Christiansburg, said she embodied “the mind-set of the Trump MAGA voter.” “You feel like you’re the underdog and you don’t get a fair shake, so you look for people that are going to shake it up,” she said of the local support for Mr. Trump’s dispute of the election results. “We don’t feel like we’ve had a voice.” Ms. March, who said she attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington but did not go to the Capitol, was inspired by Mr. Trump to win a seat in the state legislature last year. She said she could drive 225 miles east from the Kentucky border and see only Trump signs. No one in the region could imagine that he received fewer votes than President Biden, she insisted...
Saturday, October 22, 2022
'Kanye West's Dark, Twisted Fantasy
From Bari Weiss, at her Substack, "And Jewish reality":
Yesterday was any given Sunday in America, which meant that most Jews were not at all astonished when we looked down at our phones and discovered a former president was calling us ingrates and one of the most famous artists in the world was doing Louis Farrakhan one better. We are long past astonishment. For those who don’t have an anxious Jewish mother or an internet connection, here’s a glimpse of this past weekend’s bile, starting with Kanye West. “On TMZ I just saw yesterday it said, ’Pete Davidson and Kim have sex by the fireplace to honor their grandmother.’ It’s Jewish Zionists that’s about that life. That’s telling this Christian woman that has four black children to put that out as a message,” he said on a podcast, in which he went unchallenged by the hosts. Another clip: “Jewish people have owned the black voice. Whether it’s through us wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt, or it’s all of us being signed to a record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.” And another: “You know they came into money through the lawyers, when after Wall Street when all of the, like, the Catholics, they wouldn’t divorce people so the Jewish lawyers came and they were willing to divorce people. That’s when they first came into their money.” In one interview—an interview that the host, a rapper who goes by the name N.O.R.E, celebrated as having gotten more views than Sunday night football—West pulled off a perfect antisemitic hat trick: nod to our apparent sexual deviancy and perversion; accuse us of exploiting other minorities for our benefit; and suggest that our success is ill-gotten. It was almost impressive. While those clips were going viral, Donald Trump offered his own take on American Jews. “No President has done more for Israel than I have,” the former president wrote on his platform, Truth Social. “Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the US. Those living in Israel, though, are a different story—Highest approval rating in the World, could easily be PM! US Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel—Before it is too late!” Here is the part of the column where I tell you things that are also true. Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, is a brilliant musician. He is a brilliant musician who is mentally ill. Also: The Trump White House did a tremendous amount for the cause of Middle East peace. But those facts do not undermine what is undeniable. Namely, that the wealthiest musician in the world appears to hold deeply conspiratorial views about Jews informed by the antisemite Louis Farrakhan and a hate cult called the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose worldview—black people are chosen by God; Jews are pretenders—is disturbingly prevalent in large parts of American culture. And that the former president is criticizing American Jews for being ungrateful, commanding them to show him proper respect—and issuing a veiled threat if they do not. (His staunchest supporters may insist that Trump’s warning “Before it is too late!” meant “Before it is too late for America” or perhaps “too late for Israel,” the implication being that Biden isn’t as supportive of the Jewish state and so Jews need to support Trump. However you read the opaque missive, the toxic notion of the ungrateful Jew is unambiguous.) ...
Friday, October 21, 2022
2022 May Come Down to Last Gust of Political Wind
From Charlie Cook, at the Cook Political Report:
One thing on which strategists in both parties agree is that next month’s elections will feature a very high turnout level, a continuation of the last two cycles: 2018 featured the largest midterm turnout in 104 years, 2020 the biggest presidential turnout in 120 years. In recent elections it’s become a cliché for partisans to talk about the importance of mobilizing their base, yet in neither of the past two elections have they had much to worry about. This midterm doesn’t figure to end the high-turnout trend. A hallmark of midterm elections is that those in or leaning toward the party of a sitting president are lethargic, complacent, or at least a little disappointed, and less likely to vote in the general election. True to form, that is the situation Democrats had going into this past summer. Republicans were just more motivated. That gap closed during the second half of the summer and into September. Indeed, the Fox News poll released this week shows Democrats now just as motivated as Republicans. The extreme partisan polarization in recent years has yielded fewer “true independents,” ones who do not identify with or even lean toward either party, and fewer people voting split tickets. Indeed, few Democrats will now even consider voting for a Republican for anything, nor Republicans cast a ballot for a Democrat. With the party lines so rigorously followed, we now have higher floors and lower ceilings, meaning that in most competitive states and districts, the margins are rarely more than low- to mid-single digits and the trailing candidate usually remains within striking distance of the leader, hoping that circumstances or a key event will enable them to close the gap and surge or just edge ahead. But just because there are fewer true independents or undecided voters in key races doesn’t mean they are any less important. Indeed, with both parties’ bases so thoroughly motivated, any meaningful growth in support has to come from those non-aligned voters in the middle. The two closest Senate races in the country are in Nevada and Ohio...
RTWT.
'Biden: Releasing 15 Million More Barrels of Oil Reserves Right Before Election ‘Not Politically Motivated at All!’'
From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, a huge roundup, "GREAT MOMENTS IN MALARKEY."
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