U-Haul Runs Out of Trucks for Fleeing Californians, NBA Owner Says He "Doesn't Care" About Muslim Genocide, U.S. Gives More Weapons to Enemies Than Allies (The Five for 01/18/22)
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[one]
If Vladimir Putin was building up troops and attack helicopters at the border of your country, and your military was so under-equipped some soldiers drill with wooden rifle cut outs…you’d likely be pretty stressed.
That’s exactly the situation Ukraine finds themselves in currently.
But now, Ukrainians are increasingly preoccupied by the prospect of a new invasion. They don’t believe the talks with Mr. Putin will be productive, which means Russia will see military action as the only way to bring Ukraine back into Moscow’s sphere of influence. These concerns echo in my work at a think tank here and in conversations with friends and family.
Not surprisingly, a popular topic these days is how to join civilian “resistance” units to complement the military in case of an invasion. Billboards in many Ukrainian cities and on highways urge people to join the ranks, with a phone number to enlist. I’ve seen Facebook posts pop up about the necessity for a so-called emergency bag of essential items to grab when an invasion starts.
Even Kyiv — which has been considered almost a safe haven, distant from the war in the east and occupied Crimea — is on edge over fears Mr. Putin could attack Ukraine.
In June, the Biden Administration paused on delivering $100 million in weapons and supplies to Ukraine to help repel an invasion. Although $60 million worth of resources was delivered in the fall, the U.S. has not kept it’s word.
These days, we certainly treat our enemies better than our allies, as the amount of U.S. weaponry in the hands of Ukranians pale in comparison to what we equipped the Taliban with during the botched exit from Afghanistan, worth billions of dollars.
[two]
Last weekend in New York, a homeless man allegedly shoved a complete stranger in front of an oncoming train, instantly killing her. The suspect and victim didn’t know each other and had no interaction whatsoever…he simply picked a target and allegedly murdered her.
The sister of the suspect says the family begged for Martial Simon to be held in a mental facility and given full time care…something the law doesn’t currently allow for in the U.S.
The sister of the deranged ex-con accused of fatally shoving a Times Square straphanger told The Post on Monday that her sibling never should have been free to walk the streets.
Josette Simon wept as she recalled she once even begged a hospital to keep her troubled brother locked up after his life was derailed by mental illness.
“He was a hardworking man, he was a giving man,” Simon, 65, said through tears of her younger brother, Martial Simon, 61.
“At 14 years old, he started shoveling snow. He drove a taxicab. He worked from the bottom to move up to become a manager at a parking place in Manhattan. He always liked New York.
“Somehow, in his 30s, something happened and he lost it,” she said. “He kept seeing and hearing people after him. One of my sisters took him in. He stayed, and then he said, ‘I have to go back to New York.’ “
The NYPD lists the subway-shove suspect’s name as Simon Martial, although his sister identified him as Martial Simon.
(As I believe I’ve stated in previous issues of the Five), my grandfather ran a mental health hospital in Illinois. After the state pulled the funding, many former patients wound up homeless…not because they had no family, but because the family was unable to keep their schizophrenic loved one on medication…and the former patients would often run away and sleep in parks and under bridges, due to the delusion that they were being hunted (normally by the FBI, CIA or mafia).
The family couldn’t do anything, and neither could the police. Sometimes desperate relatives would show up at my grandfather’s home, begging for help. Due to the changes in mental health laws, he was as powerless as law enforcement.
If you’ve got time for a long read, this New York Times article from 1984 is an excellent look at how mental health hospitals were shut down in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the long term consequences society has paid for that decision.
[three]
As midterms approach this year, Democrats are terrified of losing elections due to…Democrats.
But with the 2022 midterms months away, the intellectual optimism and energy that defined the American left during that window has been markedly deflated. During the Trump administration, the party’s progressives dreamed of returning to power and enacting generational policy change — national health care; more than doubling the minimum wage; cancellation of student debt; a complete overhaul of the immigration system; major new social and education programs.
These aspirations — already optimistic — have been battered repeatedly in the years since the primary but most severely over the last several months, as the failure of much of President Biden’s economic agenda becomes increasingly likely.
The uncertainty has become ever more urgent as Democrats weigh their campaign message in the 2022 midterm elections. Leading Democratic campaign officials have called for the party to revamp its message to avoid a wipeout in the midterms, forcing the party grapple with whether it will jettison the far-reaching ideas that helped define it now that Republicans appear in the ascendancy.
While I do lean right, I donated to both Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 primary season, because I believed both candidates put forth original ideas and deserved a place on the debate stage. (I had little hope either would actually win).
Yang and Gabbard are progressives in the true sense of the word (proposing new ideas), but are political moderates…and were shouted down by the more extremist wing of the Democratic party…who won the White House and Congress…only to find out their ideas are deeply unpopular and dysfunctional.
When Republicans got too much power in the 2000’s, we wound up in unwinnable wars. Now that Democrats are in power, we have surging crime and murder rates and unchecked inflation.
What the “parties” represent shifts pretty quickly, election cycle to election cycle…so I prefer to align myself with a series of principals and ideas rather than an elephant or donkey, because the policies associated with those symbols are all over the place.
Rather than admit their errors and turn to new (more popular) policies while there’s still close to a year before American head back to the ballot box…Democrats seem to be content to eat their own.
For example, MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross recently accused moderate Democrat Krysten Sinema of racism because Sinema wouldn’t support the filibuster reform (essentially, changing the Senate to allow the in-power party to ram through more legislation without bi-partisan support).
“Sinema is a Democrat, but she is upholding white supremacy. I don’t think I can roll my eyes hard enough and you kind of just want to say, ‘Girl, bye,'” Cross said of Sinema.
Guest Angela Rye also weighed in, adding Sinema’s stance is “rooted in falsehoods.”
“We also know that voting rights has been supported on a bipartisan level in both chambers of Congress since 1965, when a Democrat signed the bill into law,” Rye continued. “So, what I would tell Sen. Sinema is to please reflect on your history. Not not a wobbly voice, not an emotional plea for people to remove or to not remove the filibuster when you just could cross that hurdle. Right now — I’m talking about this year — they could cross that hurdle.”
Cross added, “It is a way to ensure we’re back on that right road, and in this case, she is a hurdle on that road.”
Sinema, who hails from the very purple Arizona, is quite popular in her home state due to forging a path that doesn’t fully align with either major party.
In the past year, she’s endured increasingly drastic harassment…from her own party over not toeing the line.
CNN’s Anna Navarro appears to be in support of protestors chasing Sinema into a bathroom:
I don’t think corporate media and far-left Democrats are secretly conspiring to fill Congress with deep red Republicans come November…but that’s the most likely outcome if leading Democrat voices continue to push unpopular legislation and go to war with the more moderate wing of their own party.
[four]
Chamath Palihapitiya, minority owner of the Golden State Warriors thinks the genocide of Muslims in China is no big deal.
“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK? You bring it up because you care and I think it’s nice that you care. The rest of us don’t care,” Palihapitiya said in remarks that gained attention on Monday — Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
"I’m just telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line," he said.
The NBA has come under steady criticism for its business in China, which the Biden administration has sanctioned over its abuse of the predominately Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority. Sanctions imposed in December followed reports of suppression and human rights abuses by China against the Uyghurs.
“I think that human rights in the United States is way more important to me than human rights anywhere else on the globe. And I think that we have an abysmal track record of taking care of colored men and women in this country, and so I have zero patience and tolerance for white men blathering on about shit that happens outside your own backyard,” Palihapitiya said during an appearance on the “All-In” podcast Saturday.
Just so we’re unclear on what Palihapitiya thinks is “no big deal”…
In 2017, Tursunay Ziyawudun was arrested off the street in northern China’s Xinjiang region, forced by police officers to turn over her passport and taken to a prison camp about 30 minutes from her village. There, she was made to sing communist songs of patriotism and repeatedly told that her Muslim religion does not exist. After a month, she developed stomach issues, fainted and was released.
“They sent me to the hospital,” Ziyawudun, who came to the United States as a political refugee in 2020, told The Post. “If they hadn’t I might have died.”
The year after she was arrested off the street, still in China, she was summoned to a police station and told that she needed to complete her training. She was sent back to the “re-education” camp, where her hair was shorn — likely to be sold as a wig — and her earrings were ripped out. “They pulled it so hard that my ears were bleeding,” Ziyawudun recalled. “I was being treating like an animal.”
Breaking down and crying, she said: “I was gang-raped and my private parts were tortured with electricity. You’re left with marks on your body that make you not want to look at yourself.”
“They gave me sterilization pills,” said Ziyawudun. “I am pretty sure that is why I cannot have a baby now.”
Palihapitiya’s horrendousness disregard to the suffering of his fellow man…doesn’t really surprise me. I’ve been around the cultural elite in New York, Chicago and LA. From my experience, they treat the non-rich-and-famous as a different species.
What does surprise me is how blatantly they’re broadcasting this opinion on the internet.
[five]
California has proposed an amendment to the State Constitution that would dramatically increase the state’s income taxes to fund universal state healthcare.
California lawmakers unveiled a new bill at the beginning of the year that would establish a single-payer health care system – an ambitious plan that would be funded by nearly doubling the state's already-high taxes.
A new analysis from the Tax Foundation, a non-partisan group that generally advocates for lower taxes, found that the proposed constitutional amendment would increase taxes by roughly $12,250 per household in order to fund the first-of-its-kind health care system. In all, the tax increases are designed to raise an additional $163 billion per year, which is more than California raised in total tax revenue any year before the pandemic.
More than 600,000 residents left California last year, a surge of Golden State expats so massive that U-Haul actually ran out of trucks.
Until the next one,
-sth