The Supreme Court green-lights verifying American citizenship for voting, fraud, fraud, and more fraud, Trump gets Greenland without having to buy it, Cruz looks at EPIC City terrorism ties, the Clancy holdout juror speaks, some horrifying child abuse cases, and completely different horrifying murder house, and a surprising amount of Norm Macdonald.
The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 said the Trump administration can use an updated immigration database to verify the citizenship of voters.
A majority of justices agreed to stay pending the outcome of an appeal of a June order from a federal judge that barred the use of a revamped database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had found that federal officials were violating the privacy rights of American citizens by disclosing the citizenship status and Social Security numbers, among other data, in the restructured database. She vacated the 2025 update, which connected Social Security information to the system.
A federal appeals court later upheld the decision.
Trump administration officials then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing in a Sept. 8 brief that the order “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by states to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”
Six justices sided with the administration. In a per curiam opinion, they said that claims from the organizations that sued over the updated database “likely lack merit,” including the allegation that federal officials are violating federal laws, because Congress authorized the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive citizenship information and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration, in a 1996 statute called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.
The majority also said that keeping in place the prohibition “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies.”
States regularly use the system. Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden recently said the state in the fall of 2025 ran the names of its 18 million registered voters through the database and identified 2,724 people who may be noncitizens.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
“USDA Targets 170 NYC Retailers in SNAP Fraud Sweep. ‘SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,’ White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said.”
The Trump administration has stopped more than $5.8 billion in SNAP fraud since taking office, and its latest sweep just hit New York City, where hundreds of undercover investigations led to enforcement action against 170 retailers across all five boroughs.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced “Operation SNAP Back” on Friday as part of a broader push against retailer fraud in the nearly $100 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“This is just the latest action in the Trump Administration’s fight against fraud. The message is clear, if you accept any portion of an annual $100 billion taxpayer program, you must follow the rules or face the consequences,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said. “We owe it to every American taxpayer to safeguard their hard-earned dollars, and these latest enforcement actions are just a small part of the Food and Nutrition Administration’s efforts to remove criminals and bad actors from food stamps.”
The cases involve SNAP trafficking, where benefits are exchanged for cash, along with retailers accused of allowing benefits to be used for alcohol and other ineligible non-food items. USDA says penalties can range from temporary suspension to permanent disqualification and monetary fines. Several cases were also referred to the USDA Office of Inspector General for possible criminal investigation and prosecution.
Investigators used undercover purchases at stores suspected of violating SNAP rules. Some retailers were caught exchanging benefits for cash, while others allegedly processed transactions for prohibited products.
“SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,” White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said. “And thanks to Secretary Rollins, such waste and abuse will stop.”
Here’s your reminder that the fraud is still continuing – boldly, even! – after months of nonstop reporting about it.
Katie Daviscourt of the Post Millennial did some looking into Somali-run daycares in the Seattle area, many of which receive tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars monthly, and you’ll never guess what she found.
Most showed no signs of kids.
Many neighbors say they’ve never seen anything that looks like a daycare in the area!
These families get together, watch each other’s kids sometimes, incorporate as a “daycare,” and collect tens of thousands a month.
Here’s the PM:
In total, Daviscourt reported that in just two neighborhoods there were over $5 million in potential abuses of taxpayer funds, and they had gone to over 20 locations reporting to be daycare locations. Under Seattle’s Child Care Assistance Program, daycares can request government funding in order to back their businesses when they are caring for low-to-middle-income families.
Vice President JD Vance and the White House’s anti-fraud task force canceled Affordable Care Act policies covering more than 760,000 people, the administration announced Tuesday, citing suspected improper and fraudulent enrollments.
The task force, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimates the move will save taxpayers $2.2 billion.
Following the cancellation of 315,000 enrollments, the vice president said officials are going to conduct “additional verification” on about 419,000 more enrollees, whom they suspect may be improperly enrolled or ineligible for the program. Similarly, the Trump administration is banning some insurance brokers who are thought to be complicit in the fraudulent enrollment.
“We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled,” Vance said. “We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits.”
Snip.
“This is what the fraud task force is all about,” the vice president said, alongside CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and other senior administration officials at Tuesday’s press conference. “Saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important” are not victim to waste and fraud.
Oz noted that CMS has issued termination notices to hundreds of brokers, including 469 in late August, and has placed a moratorium on new agents and brokers while officials investigate the eligibility of the additional 419,000 enrollees.
“There will be no new brokers for Obamacare in this country for the next six months, and we do not feel at all conflicted about that decision, because most of the fraud, a disproportionate amount of the fraud, is taking place from these individuals,” Oz said.
The ACA — colloquially known as Obamacare — was passed in 2010 under former President Barack Obama.
And its baleful effects on health care and the federal budget live on…
California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden. To sustain the arrangement, the state imposes the nation’s highest tax rates.
In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime.
We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal aliens can enroll in public-welfare programs or receive benefits on their children’s behalf. In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year. The state’s shadow welfare system, it seems, shows no signs of slowing down.
Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.
“If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”
In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.
“If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the officer said of CalWORKs, the state’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”
These benefits add up. In California, illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health insurance, and various tax credits. Their children qualify for others, including CalWORKs and, as in other states, Section 8 rental subsidies. All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two U.S.-born children, and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year.
State leaders are proud of it. In a recent podcast episode, Governor Gavin Newsom bragged about his “controversial” decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encouraged people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program whose promotional materials assure applicants that “no Social Security number” is “no problem.”
Snip.
Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens. To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.
Medicaid is a good example. Federal law prohibits states from using federal dollars to provide wraparound coverage to illegal immigrants. So, California used a state-funding “bucket” within its Medi-Cal program to extend “full-scope” coverage to illegal aliens. The expansions enrolled some 1.7 million people, costing the state an estimated $10 billion annually—more than twice what the state legislative analyst originally projected.
California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.
Another way that California shuffles cash to illegal immigrants is through those aliens’ children. CalWORKs allows illegal-immigrant parents to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born kids. BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare clearinghouse, even tells applicants that the program will accept a “statement” that the applicant “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible” to qualify for the program.
This model—permissive rules and large loopholes—costs the state billions per year. As benefits and eligibility continue to expand, that figure will only increase in the years ahead.
California shows no sign of paring back this largesse. In 2022, Newsom signed a bill into law that extended taxpayer-funded food benefits to illegal low-income residents. Beginning next October, qualified Californians 55 and older will become eligible for that program, regardless of immigration status. California’s Legislative Analyst estimates that it could cost up to an additional $400 million a year.
Is there any doubt that California Democrats love illegal aliens far more than citizens? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
California Democrats pulled up the ladder to prevent the likes of Nick Shirley and local reporters like JJ Smith, Amy Reichert, and many others from finding out where millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars were fraudulently spent.
In my story, Karen Bass Feels Heat From Feds Over Millions in Stolen and Laundered ‘Homeless’ Funds, we learned that Bill Essayli, who’s supposed to be the U.S. attorney in Central California (LA area) but isn’t because John Thune can’t do his job, this week announced the arrests and indictments of four individuals who had stolen millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars. They were supposed to house and help the homeless, but they helped themselves instead.
After the indictments were announced and after the U.S. House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Authority operators to please come to Washington to have a little chat — under oath — the homeless authority announced it no longer wanted to receive federal funding and, in fact, plans to get out of the homeless business entirely.
Bass and the people in Los Angeles who have run this agency into the ground after bilking taxpayers for years are getting out of the homeless business.
The California Post reports, “LAHSA will not seek to retain responsibility for the annual application for federal homelessness funding, the Homeless Management Information System, the annual point-in-time count or the coordinated-entry system.”
The same federal funding that came from your pockets and mine. The same federal funding lost after these alleged California homeless advocates threw piles of cash in front of an industrial fan and pointed it in the general direction of people who deserve to be in prison.
Follow-up: “Satellite imagery shows significant damage to Moscow Oil Refinery after Ukraine’s drone strike yesterday. Multiple strikes are recorded and oil tanks confirmed destroyed. Additionally, a Pantsir booster intercepted a car.”
“Big JDAM Air Strike on Troop Concentration in Bilytske, Donetsk.” Early in the war, Ukraine couldn’t have carried out a JDAM strike, due to fears of Russian aircraft and SAM batteries, indicating serious Ukrainian degradation of those categories of Russian weapons.
More winning: “Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up.”
Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity. This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it’s the most utility shutdown events in the country’s recent history.
Even when Cuba’s grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time. Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff.
“Protocols are now in place to begin the gradual restoration of the system,” said Felix Estrada, an official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of the city remained completely dark.
Many exhausted residents of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.
“Yesterday I’d gone without power for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.
Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.
The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.
The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.
A linked story suggests it’s the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Greg Gutfeld is rightly upset that Austin’s commie twerp of a U.S. rep is more upset at an illegal alien getting shot than the murder of Andrew Wimsatt, an American citizen he theoretically represented.
On Labor Day a man, Andrew Wimsatt, was viciously murdered in an Austin Park – in an attempted beheading. This creep didn’t give two shits about it.
We often hear leftists accuse billionaires of buying government, and most times the accusations are at least partly off-base.
But not always, and sometimes they are literally doing precisely that: putting privately funded leftists into government offices to run a parallel government that nobody ever voted for. It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.
One such program, funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, placed and paid the salaries of “government employees” strategically inserted into Attorney General offices in Blue states, funding regulations and lawsuits aimed at targets that Bloomberg’s NYU-based NGO program identified as vulnerable to its pressure. The goal was, of course, fighting climate change.
BREAKING: Bloomberg-Backed Climate Group Paying Salaries of Democratic State AG Officials Quietly Shuts Down Amid Congressional, Legal Scrutiny.
“A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.”
Think of it as a cousin to “Zuckerbucks,” where a private entity funds a program that places people in government offices as either quasi- or fully government employees, with a mandate to pursue the NGO’s agenda. The same sort of thing happens with grants to news organizations, where an outside group pays for employees or “coverage” of specific issues, and the stories are still technically the product of the news organization, but the content is directed at producing the results desired by the people who cut the checks.
Snip.
Bloomberg, cut a big check to NYU, which in turn established a program to place its people directly into the offices of State Attorneys General, where they proceeded to sue and harass businesses targeted by the organization.
James Comer opened an investigation into the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, and out of the blue, it closed. He sought documents from it, and “poof!” It’s gone.
In my view, Angela Merkel bears a grave responsibility for the collapse of the centre and the growing ability of the political extremes to set the agenda.
The almost one-third of voters who would support Alternative für Deutschland in a national election are not fascists or Nazis. A substantial proportion are disillusioned CDU voters.
What has disappointed these voters? First, what I see as Merkel’s failures on so many fronts: immigration. Security. Energy. A sustainable strategy for business and economic growth. Digitalisation. Infrastructure maintenance. The list is almost endless.
Second, the extraordinary denial of reality that, in my assessment, Merkel allowed to take hold when it came to immigrants’ responsibility for antisemitism, violence against women, terrorism and gang crime.
Coming from Denmark, where we have reliable statistics on all these matters, I find it frankly shocking to listen to the nonsense coming from Germany’s political elite.
But I would also trace back to Merkel the rise of what is often called “Islamo-leftism” – a tendency that has recently gained ground in Sweden and is also growing in Germany. In Sweden, polls have indicated that 85 per cent of Muslim voters support parties to the left of centre, with almost one in five supporting the Left Party, Vänsterpartiet – a party tainted by antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism. I see no compelling reason to assume that the pattern in Germany is fundamentally different.
My argument, then, is that it is not only the rise in support for the AfD that can be traced back to Merkel. The same applies to the growing support for parties on the German left that promote the political and religious views of a significant proportion of the people, Merkel invited to Germany. Not least on the Gaza question.
Both Democrats and the international left has derided President Trump’s focus on Greenland, saying the U.S. controlling it was a fantasy. Now that he’s signed an agreement with Denmark, I doubt they’re laughing now.
The US-Greenland-Denmark agreement has now been published. I haven’t read it, but Arnaud Bertrand has. This is his analysis of the terms, which appear very favorable to the United States, and well calculated to achieve the goal of preventing undue influence over the Arctic by any hostile power.
Snip.
To sum up:
– The US secured a permanent military foothold that even an independent Greenland would inherit whether it likes it or not
– The US now has veto power over any non-NATO military presence in Greenland, and over who can invest in its strategic infrastructure and resources (beyond NATO and the EU)
– Denmark signed away its say over the principle of new US bases, with only the right to discuss the “implementation details”
– Danish authorities no longer set the rules for US military movement across the island
– And all of it is now justified by the defense of “the American continent”
Lindsay Clancy holdout juror Michael P. Desronvil speaks out.
Michael is a Catholic from a Haitian immigrant family and moved to Massachusetts when he was a young child.
The liberal women who so badly want to destroy him for refusing to acquit a child killer do not know how to handle that. Their woke brains simply cannot compute how to proceed.
Several jurors who wanted to let Clancy off the hook have claimed that Michael did not follow the jury instructions, but they have incriminated themselves with statements indicating they had an ideological agenda in the courtroom. Michael says he “kept getting cut off” by these other jurors, who apparently knew his own thoughts better than him.
This lines up with a statement from a fourth juror who says she was ultimately badgered into changing her vote.”
A female 4th juror comes forward and says the other jurors were pushing to acquit on *DAY 1*
In fact, a whole lot of basic jury procedures seem to have been discarded in the Clancy trial. “Lindsay Clancy jurors broke cardinal rule and used phones to RESEARCH killer mom during deliberations, holdout claims.”
“Feds arrest, indict hundreds in Trump voter fraud crackdown: ‘Catching it all over the country.’ The Justice Department says its crackdown on noncitizen voting and election fraud has already produced more than 200 arrests and indictments, with that number possibly doubling soon and state election officials themselves now facing potential charges for looking the other way.”
Since the Trump Justice Department warned state and local election officials that they could be charged with allowing fraudulent voting activities, more than 200 arrests and indictments have been secured in a crackdown on election fraud and noncitizen voting, and that number could double soon, a top official revealed to Just the News.
“I think there are a lot of nervous election officials because I think some of them know that they’ve been looking the other way when this is happening, and we’re catching it all over the country,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said Monday night in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.
Dhillon also hinted at further developments in the coming weeks, suggesting her department has developed evidence calling into question New Jersey’s claim that a computer glitch allowed thousands of foreigners to register to vote in that state and about 400 to actually cast ballots in violation of law.
“I’m not sure we have the correct numbers from New Jersey. They’re not really cooperating with us, and so we will get to the bottom of what happened there. And you know, New Jersey tried to blame a vendor for a mistake or a glitch, quote unquote. But you know, I think there’ll be another side to that story,” she said.
Snip.
Over the weekend, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that his agency is investigating 1,620 cases of voter fraud involving noncitizens and has made 151 arrests. He said his department is also looking into an additional 300,000 cases based on states’ voter rolls.
That thing that never happens keeps happening. “DOJ Charges 16 Noncitizens in Voter Fraud Cases.”
Howard Dean speaks to the ChiComs: “DNC Chairman Emeritus Howard Dean delivered the American welcome address at a China dialogue involving the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank identified in congressional commission testimony as ‘run by Chinese intelligence.’ The Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, which co-organized the event, has an equally explicit allegiance. Its charter says it: ‘upholds the comprehensive leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Ties between the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the proposed EPIC City development in North Texas came under scrutiny during a recent U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing chaired by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
EPIC City, which has been criticized as an Islamic enclave and housing development exclusive to Muslims, is a proposal from the East Plano Islamic Center.
The Wednesday hearing of the subcommittee on federal courts, oversight, agency action, and federal rights was titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.”
Sen. Cruz addressed the fact that Democrat senators failed to attend the meeting, stating that “their campaign is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America.”
Cruz heard from witnesses that alleged ties between CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and EPIC City.
Arielle F. Klepach, senior litigation counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center, called attention to the connection in her written testimony.
She likened the EPIC City development, later rebranded as “The Meadow” following significant backlash, to a pattern of “mega-mosque” building projects in Europe commonly motivated by “Islamist separatism.”
This movement is a “deliberate attempt to cut Muslim communities off spiritually, intellectually, and culturally from the surrounding secular society,” with the building projects in particular “generally [containing] community-like features such as schools, libraries, and gyms,” according to Klepach.
“The American version of this pattern is EPIC City,” Klepach said. “CAIR-Texas and CAIR-DFW have publicly defended EPIC City in the disputes, and CAIR’s national leadership has spoken at the EPIC mosque, reflecting an active advocacy relationship between CAIR and the EPIC religious community.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was designated a foreign terrorist organization by Gov. Greg Abbott late last year, along with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The hearing also revisited CAIR’s role as an unindicted co-conspirator to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). The foundation and five of its officials were convicted of “funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas” during a 2008 federal trial. CAIR was not charged in the case.
Lara Burns, senior research fellow for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, drew the connection between CAIR and Hamas in her written testimony.
“The United States Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee served as the original Hamas infrastructure in the United States, initially consisting of the HLF (the fundraising arm),” alongside others, according to Burns.
“At the [2008] trial, still today the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in American history, [various arms of the Muslim Brotherhood] were identified as unindicted co-conspirators/joint ventures as was [CAIR],” she added.
A father-and-son serial killer house of horror found in Pennsylvania.
A Pennsylvania father and son have come under suspicion after the son was discovered to be traveling with a woman with a fake ID that used the name of a missing woman.
Police searched the home of the man and his dad and found the most disturbing scene imaginable.
he investigation is still unfolding but this is some seriously unsettling stuff going on.
Here’s the latest from ABC 6 in Philly on the now 7 missing women connected to this case against Eugene Horsch and his deceased father RC:
Blair Tonzelli was 35 years old when she went missing in 2023. She was the first woman named in this case.
Police say when Horsch was arrested, he was with a woman in possession of an identification card with Tonzelli’s name on it. The woman allegedly told police Eugene Horsch gave her the ID.
Amy McHale was 44 years old when she was last seen in 2016. Shortly after news broke of Horsch’s arrest, her family told Action she was last seen at the W. Chew Avenue house.
McHale had previously been married to Ray Horsch, who has also become a central figure in this case.
Gabrielle Amarando was 22 years old when she disappeared in 2012.
A childhood friend of Amarando told Action News that loved ones grew increasingly concerned when they stopped hearing from her…
Roughly 14 years later, her family got the confirmation they were looking for.
In August, police said the women were seen in photos and videos recovered during the investigation, in which both are seen alive and then later appearing to be dead.
‘Based on the video and photo evidence — if the images in the video are real and not altered in any way, based on their review — the M.E. would believe the individuals depicted in the images are deceased,’ Philadelphia Police Inspector Ray Evers.
Maribel Fresses was the other woman seen in the videos and photos. She [was] 27 when she disappeared in 2018.
Police also saw photos and videos of two other unidentified women, both alive and then dead, as well as video of the elder Horsch strangling a woman to death.
Five urns believed to have the unidentified remains of five women were found in the home.
Millions of photos and videos have so far revealed that at least 7 women who went missing ultimately met their demise at the hands of the Horsches.
Shades of H. H. Holmes…
UK functionaries go out of their way to protect their precious illegal aliens. “British government mobilizes HUNDREDS of police and defense units to protect migrant boat from British protesters.”
Third World migrants are being led across the channel by French authorities, where British police then escort them into harbor, put them aboard taxpayer-funded coach buses, and give them a police escort with hundreds of officers.
Snip.
Earlier in the day, British protesters gathered by land and by sea to peacefully demonstrate against a group of 60 or so migrants that was set to land in southern England in Gosport.
Because of the protesters gathered along the coast, authorities had to scramble to find a new landing spot for the “newcomers.” The buses were seen with a massive police escort.
The reason for the escort was due to the fear that the British protesters would get “mostly peaceful” and attack the invaders or the masked bus drivers who are helping traffic them into the country:
One GB News reporter summed up the massive taxpayer expenditure that was spent to assist the migrants:
The whole thing from start to finish today, for this one boat of 60-odd or however many it turns out to be, to go all the way flanked by a massive French ship, then to our [Royal National Lifeboat Institution] boats, then all of those resources pumped into Gosport.
And THEN, it looks as though because of the local reaction, they’ve decided to not to that, take them down either to Eastport or Dover or somewhere else anyway.
So goodness knows what the resources are going to be like there.
We are talking MILLIONS of Pounds today alone, for a group of 60 illegal migrants.
Is there any doubt the Labour government prioritizes importing illegal aliens into the country over taking care of their own citizens?
Forget about Somali daycare fraud for a moment – have you heard about toddler fight club? A daycare in Fort Worth, TX is facing investigations and litigation after evidence showed staff abusing young children and forcing them to fight each other.
One mother, Heather Harris, knew something was wrong when she picked up her 4-year-old son at the Arka Montessori Academy of Risinger daycare. He was crying uncontrollably and was covered in bruises. Employees told the mother her son had fought with another child, but their explanations did not add up, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Harris and her husband, Richard Harris. She insisted on seeing the classroom’s surveillance footage.
The disturbing footage shows staff at the daycare swing a child around like a rag-doll and trying to force him to fight another child.
I’m skipping right past the obvious “First Rule of Toddler Fight Club” joke to point out that if my (theoretical) kid were forced into that, both daycare and the employees would be facing both a huge civil lawsuit and criminal charges.
More horrifying child abuse: “Transgender ICU nurse arrested on multiple counts of abusing NICU baby at Michigan hospital.”
[Kieran Ansley], a now-former nurse at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has been charged with child abuse after a 4-month-old girl in his [sic] care was found with multiple broken bones and bruising.
The injuries were noticed by the infant’s mother during an early morning visit in April, records show. Tests and a full skeletal survey found multiple fractures, including broken leg bones and multiple bruises, court records show. Bruising was found on the infant’s hands, arms, thigh, buttocks, abdomen and tongue, court records show.
‘The totality of the findings resulted in a diagnosis of pediatric physical abuse,’ court documents show.
More horrifying details snipped. Hell’s too good for him.
Dallas’ “Y’all Street” continues to capitalize on momentum as the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) enters a new era of growth.
North Texas has added a stock exchange alongside its iconic stockyards, and companies are beginning to flock to the TXSE’s transfer portal. TXSE opened in July, and September has seen the first corporate commitments and primary listing transfers.
On September 16, Texas Capital’s Texas Equity Index exchange-traded fund (ETF) and Texas Oil Index ETF became the TXSE’s first primary listings. The company’s CEO, President, and Chairman, Rob Holmes, rang the bell on “Y’all Street” to celebrate the company’s primary listing transfer. Texas Capital was formerly listed on the Nasdaq.
Holmes stated in a Bloomberg interview about the transfer, “Once this exchange came to fruition, it was our responsibility to look at the three exchanges and pick the best one for Texas Capital.”
He praised the TXSE’s investor base as an affirmation of the exchange’s technological and strategic innovation. The TXSE saw over $275 million in total investment, with major investors including BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Charles Schwab.
Competing securities exchanges include the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, both based in New York City.
Holmes asserted that TXSE’s net present value (NPV) is “better” than its New York rivals.
“On this exchange, instead of just paying a fee, we pay a fee, but at the end of the day we have a net cash position from the exchange,” he said.
If someone can explain what that last sentence means, please do so in the comments…
“Democrat candidate caught crying in the back of cop car after DUI arrest. Washington state Democratic House candidate Krista Perez was seen crying, praying and sobbing in the back of a patrol car after her DUI arrest.” Washington state has a jungle primary, with two Democratic candidates for House of Representatives District 29-Position 1 (the state has 49 districts of two reps each) facing each other in November, so Republicans won’t be able to take advantage here.
Jay Leno’s Law, exempting classic cars from California’s draconian emissions regulations, was signed into law in a rare act of sanity from Governor Hairgel. But note it doesn’t take effect until January 1, 2028.
Remember back when Democrats swore up and down that ObamaCare was going to solve all our health care problems? That prices were going to fall and we could all keep our doctors? Those were lies meant to let them cartelize medicine and generate record profits for Big Medicine. One effect: A huge jump in fraud.
Taxpayers spent $65 billion on health insurance premiums for people who either didn’t exist or didn’t qualify for benefits in two federal programs in 2024, according to an Aug. 26 report from Paragon Health Institute.
Expanded Medicaid and Obamacare, the signature programs of the Affordable Care Act, improperly enrolled a combined 14.3 million people that year, researchers concluded.
Expanded Medicaid allows states to enroll people making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, versus up to 100 percent for traditional Medicaid. That limit was about $35,600 for a family of three in 2024.
Obamacare was open to people earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level at that time, about $103,000 for a family of three.
Both programs are administered through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace, with coverage provided by commercial insurance companies.
As Lawrence Wilson details below, via The Epoch Times, researchers estimate that about 34 percent of all Marketplace enrollees in 2024 were either fraudulent, duplicates, or simply didn’t meet the benefit criteria.
And the number went up the next year, researchers said.
“Improper exchange enrollment increased by more than 26 percent from 2024 to 2025 – up to an estimated 6.5 million enrollees,” the report stated.
Researchers studied federal data from surveys, program enrollment, and spending and concluded that more than 9 million Medicaid expansion enrollees in 2024 probably didn’t qualify for the benefit.
Those were likely people whose income was over the limit, did not meet citizenship, immigration, or residency requirements, or should have been enrolled in traditional Medicaid.
It seems that getting illegal aliens on every possible welfare state program has been a driving goal of the Democrat Party for quite some time now. From Somali Lering Centers to fake hospices, it seems like an awful lot of the modern welfare state was designed to be defrauded, with significant amounts of that fraud ending up in Democrat pockets.
And then California passes the Stop Nick Shirley Act, and you realize that welfare state fraud isn’t baked in, it was designed in to transfer money from taxpayers to leftist grandees and NGOs.
The fraud wasn’t a side effect, it was the entire point of creating the program.
Happy Independence Day Eve! We plan to celebrate America’s 250th Birthday tomorrow in the time-honored tradition: Blowing things up.
More Democrat welfare state fraud, dispatches from the Democrat Civil War, another very bad week for Russian logistics (and aircraft, and any Russians trying to buy fuel), Eurocrats want lowly peons to die of heatstroke rather than use the air conditioning enjoyed by their betters…
…a followup to the weird Plano ISD booster club story, plus Mexican Batman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Finally: “DOJ Grand Jury Probes Neville Roy Singham’s Marxist NGO Empire.”
Fox News’ Asra Nomani reports that on Monday, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is examining whether Singham, NGOs he funded, or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, or other financial crimes.
Prosecutors have issued subpoenas seeking bank records and other financial documents, according to Nomani’s sources.
Nomani’s team recently reported that Singham pumped $285 million through a Goldman Sachs donor-advised philanthropy fund and shell entities before it flowed into US nonprofits, while a broader review showed that $591 million flowed across five continents from 2017 through 2025.
More color from the report:
Of that money, Fox News Digital established a documented $278 million flowed directly from Singham into organizations that “sow discord” in the U.S., as House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith put it earlier this year at a hearing a dynamics called “foreign malign influence.”
Singham, who resides in China, has a long track record of assisting far-left entities, such as Code Pink and the Party for Socialism and other socialist NGOs, that oppose U.S. interests and support U.S. adversaries.
According to investigative reports (e.g., New York Times, 2023), Singham has worked closely with pro-CCP propaganda networks targeting the US.
Any Democrat or NGO staffers who knowingly accepted communist Chinese money need to go to prison.
“RFK Jr. Says 1 Million Obamacare Enrollees Lacked Social Security Numbers. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said 1 million people were enrolled in Obamacare health plans without Social Security numbers, as the Trump administration pledged to intensify efforts to combat fraud in federal health care programs.” Was ObamaCare designed from the ground up to provide taxpayer-funded medical care for illegal aliens, or did Democrats just see the opportunity along the way?
Finally Redux: “Supreme Court: States Can Ban Trans Athletes From Girls’ Sports.”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that states can block biological transgender males from competing in girls’ sports. In a 6-3 ruling, the court gave an iron-clad answer to the question.
Writing for the majority in West Virginia v. B.P.J. (consolidated with Little v. Hecox), Justice Brett Kavanaugh held that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause requires schools to carve out an exception for transgender athletes who’ve undergone hormone therapy or never experienced male puberty. States can draw the line at biological sex, full stop – no judge-administered athlete-by-athlete fairness hearings required. The ruling reverses both the Fourth Circuit (which sided with West Virginia’s B.P.J.) and the Ninth Circuit (which sided with Idaho’s Lindsay Hecox), and lands squarely in the wake of last year’s Skrmetti decision, extending its “this is a sex classification, not a transgender classification” framework from medical care straight into the locker room.
The transsexual madness gripping the left deserves its own chapter in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
“DOJ Sues States Over Alleged Failure To Turn Over Food Stamp Data. The Trump administration has sued four states, accusing them of withholding crucial data on food stamp applicants.” The only surprise is that California is not among them.
Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania refused to turn over information to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that would let federal officials identify fraud, Trump administration lawyers said in lawsuits filed on June 26 against the states.
Officials are asking judges to enter injunctions that would force state authorities to hand over the last five years of applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the food stamp program known as SNAP.
The USDA requested the SNAP data in 2025, citing an executive order from President Donald Trump that directed agencies to stop waste, fraud, and abuse, and many states complied with the request.
Data from those states showed that states had enrolled some 186,000 people in SNAP despite those people being deceased, among the discrepancies that added up to $3 billion in wasteful spending, the department said in a report.
We known Minnesota isn’t turning it over due to the massive fraud lining Democrat pockets, and the same is probably true in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Kentucky is pretty red, but Democrat Governor Andy Beshear must be doing his best to gear up the fraud there.
The Democratic Party has two main factions right now, which can conveniently be described as the Organized Crime Democrats, who view the government as primarily a vehicle to distribute resources and power to friends, allies, and clients who can be counted on to return their largesse with reliable votes, and the Bolsheviks, who want to do all those things as well, but whose overriding goal is the destruction of the United States and Western Civilization and replace it with Third World communism.
For decades, at least, the Organized Crime Democrats have dominated the party, but they have tolerated and even fostered the growth of the Bolsheviks with the mistaken belief that no group of clients can ever be more reliable than those who could not in a million years vote for the Republicans.
Snip.
The OCDs’ alliance with and fostering of the radical left has come back to bite them in the nether regions now. As their resources have become constrained, the Bolsheviks have become ever more powerful, and as is always the case, the revolutionaries despise their allies as much as their ideological opponents, and now feel ready to take them out.
And, so far, their putsch is working, and the OCDs are rightfully frightened.
I had previously reported on this civil war much earlier, but I used the terms “insane wing” and “corrupt wing.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Russian full shortages. “4km Line for Fuel in Russia’s Zabaykalsky Krai Region: 28 Hour Wait!” That’s all the way out east near Mongolia.
A JOINT PROJECT BY the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and the investigative website The Insider has uncovered the existence and inner workings of a previously unknown Russian intelligence and cover action unit. The unit’s formal name is Military Unit 75127, but it is known within Russia’s intelligence establishment as Center 795. The Russian government reportedly created the unit in December 2022—less than a year following the Kremlin’s full military invasion of Ukraine.
Snip.
Notably, unlike other special activities units in Russia’s intelligence arsenal, Center 795 does not appear to reside within the GRU. Instead, it appears to operate independently of military intelligence oversight and to report directly to General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff of and First Deputy Minister of Defense, or to one of his subordinate deputy defense ministers.
According to the investigative reports, the existence of Center 795 was revealed when one of its officers, Denis Alimov, used Google to translate a message sent to him by a Serbian operative living in the United States. This allowed the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation to use a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) warrant and access the Google Translate transcripts. Alimov was eventually arrested in Bogotá, Colombia, on February 24, 2026, after arriving there on a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul, Turkey. He is currently awaiting extradition to New York.
A Minnesota pardon board that includes Gov Tim Walz among its three members has issued a full pardon to a convicted Laotian child-molester, torpedoing Homeland Security’s effort to deport him. The 42-year-old convict, Tou Lue Vang, submitted a letter to the board saying he regretted what he did — and just like that, his criminal record is now clean as a whistle via unanimous decision.
“Governor Tim Walz’s decision to pardon an illegal alien convicted child rapist so he can remain in our country is disgusting,” said DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis. “These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting. Tou Lue Vang lost his legal status following his conviction for repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl.”
Find someone who loves you as much as Democrats love illegal alien child molesters…
The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave.
Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: ‘BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.’
The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners, and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.
Britons have been ordered to remove air conditioning from their homes – despite the country baking in up to 40C heat this week – under a fresh Net Zero crackdown.
Planning officials at councils have told residents to take down their cooling units over concerns about carbon dioxide emissions.
They say AC, despite the heat, should serve only as a ‘last resort’.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to disturb the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding a sweeping Texas election security law banning paid vote harvesting.
Senate Bill 1, passed in 2021, aimed to extensively reform election security and eliminate paid vote harvesting with increased criminal penalties for offenses.
Vote harvesting is the practice of collecting and returning completed ballots, which can be used as a cover for voter fraud and voter coercion. Paid harvesters are often intent on delivering results for a specific candidate or measure.
A source told Axios the DOJ started the investigation after a “whistleblower complaint” in Southern California.
Gallego’s problems began after numerous women came forward accusing his bestie, former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), of sexual misconduct.
In April, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) claimed, “There is a woman that allegedly is coming forward with attorneys, wants to go on-record about an incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time, and the event was sexual in nature, allegedly.
Last week, I wrote about how Politico scrutinized Gallego’s financial records and discovered he used leadership PAC campaign cash to fund luxury outings with his family since he launched his Senate campaign in 2023.
The Senate Ethics Committee dismissed an inquiry into those allegations against Gallego on Monday.
Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging California’s Plastics Act, arguing it imposes burdensome regulations on companies doing business with California and will increase the cost of everyday American products.
The lawsuit, which Paxton joined alongside the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and 16 additional attorneys general, calls the California law a “blatant and unprecedented attempt to impose its own policy preferences on the entire nation” and argues that it infringes on the sovereignty of other states.
Implemented May 1, “the Plastics Act” places new requirements on goods containing plastic shipped into and out of California, affecting both producers and consumers nationwide.
The act forces companies that sell products in the state to reduce single‑use plastic packaging, make it recyclable or compostable, and help pay for recycling and cleanup. It does this through strict reduction and recycling targets by 2032 and an extended producer responsibility program that shifts costs from taxpayers to packaging producers.
Paxton’s office expressed alarm that the regulations and fees will drive up prices for everyday goods and discriminate against out-of-state businesses.
“I am challenging California’s Plastics Act to protect businesses from unnecessary regulations and Texans from higher costs on the products they use every day,” said Paxton. “Texas has always been a place where businesses can thrive, and I will ensure it remains that way. I will not allow California lawmakers to harm Texas businesses.”
The lawsuit further challenges California’s decision to place the private organization Circular Action Alliance in charge of implementing the law.
According to the complaint, the CAA would collect roughly $500 million annually from businesses while operating with little public oversight or transparency.
So a left-wing, radical environmental NGO gets to benefit directly by running left-wing, radical environmental program. What are the odds?
The Supreme Court of Texas (SCOTX) determined on Friday that a woman who regretted her gender modification surgery did not file her claims too late to take her providers to court, in a case centered on the state’s statute of limitations in medical malpractice cases.
Soren Aldaco of Tarrant County sued her healthcare providers and counselors for fraud and negligence over their roles in obtaining gender modification procedures for her, including a double mastectomy at age 19 — a procedure she later came to regret.
After the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth rejected Aldaco’s appeal in November 2024 on the basis that her medical claim had expired, affirming the Tarrant County district court’s prior summary judgement, SCOTX accepted her petition for review and scheduled the case for oral arguments on February 11, 2026.
A SCOTX opinion was then issued by Justice James P. Sullivan four months later on Friday morning, reversing the finding that her claims had expired on the basis that the clock began ticking once the injury occurred, not when her therapist recommended her for the procedure.
Aldaco’s therapist, Barbara Rose Wood of the Three Oaks Counseling Group, wrote her a letter of recommendation for a double mastectomy after the Crane Clinic advised her that she would need one in order to move forward with the procedure.
Those who inflicted radical surgery on teenagers in the name of social justice deserve to lose every dime they own.
In response to lawmakers’ request for a pause on extra-high-voltage transmission lines, transmission service providers admitted reliance on wind and solar power, along with government intervention, is driving Permian Basin energy issues. This aligns with a third-party report that the lines are primarily built to support wind and solar, while local reliable generation alternatives were never fully examined.
Providers argued that public utility commissioners do not have the power to grant lawmakers’ request to pause the project. The next day, state senators announced they would hold a hearing on the proposed lines in late July.
This centers on ERCOT’s 765-kilovolt Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan (STEP), a key part of the Permian Basin Reliability Plan (PBRP). STEP proposes three transmission lines spanning over 1,200 miles to move power from East Texas into the natural-gas-rich Permian Basin, with routes crossing North Texas, Central Texas, and South Texas.
The three lines are split into five interconnected segments for Phase 1. Phase 2 would build 765-kV lines from Northeast-East Texas southward through Central and South Texas. This eastern portion would tie into the lines leading into the Permian Basin.
On June 24, in a joint filing, Transmission Service Providers (TSPs) Oncor, Lower Colorado River Authority Transmission Service Corporation, AEP Texas, and City of San Antonio-owned CPS Energy admitted that the risk to sustained electrical supply in West Texas is “greatest during low-wind, no-solar conditions, when the Permian Basin relies heavily on imports” from the lower voltage 345-kV network.
The TSPs’ filing was in response to a June 15 brief by more than 40 state lawmakers asking PUCT to pause the project. They filed it in support of pro-landowner American Stewards of Liberty’s motion to defer deciding the need for the first four segments.
The lawmakers cited Dr. Brent Bennett, who wrote the May 2026 study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Bennett warned that the “main effect of the 765-kV lines is to integrate more wind and solar into the ERCOT grid,” and that helping ERCOT “manage [such] a future system … to meet growing industrial demand” is the “primary rationale” for the lines.
This comes roughly five years after the 2021 winter blackouts. Two failures that energy specialist Jason Isaac said contributed to the problem are overreliance on “unreliable” wind and solar and market-distorting subsidies for wind and solar.
Bennett wrote that more transmission “does not ensure that enough new reliable generation will be built to meet demand and could even discourage such generation if the transmission provides wind and solar favorable market access.”
Bennett and ASL believe that building new dispatchable power generation, such as natural gas, in the Permian Basin was not fully examined as an alternative. The TSPs wrote they “do not dispute” that more such generation would benefit the Permian Basin.
When local taxpayers used cash, a tax office employee would put the cash in an envelope and record the payment as part of a “batch” of payments in the office’s tax collection software, Spindlemedia.
After reaching between $15,000 to $20,000, an employee would close that batch of payments in the software. At this point, Williams was responsible for depositing the cash from the envelopes into the district’s bank accounts.
Williams’ indictment alleges that she stole $996,174 in cash and disguised the theft by reversing payments recorded in certain batches, recorded those payments in new batches, and kept the new batches open for long periods in the Spindlemedia software.
Las Vegas cops busted a transgender gunman who allegedly planned a casino massacre using a huge cache of weapons.
Allison Howlett, 36, who was born a man but lives as a woman, was arrested Saturday on charges of making terroristic threats, assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, gun theft and other offenses.
The wild story unfolded shortly after 9:30 a.m. Saturday when Howlett’s former spouse, who is female, called police to report Howlett had stolen her car and the vehicle held numerous firearms, Henderson Police Chief Reggie Rader said.
You know how the MSM always report “arsenals” that seem like fairly puny gun collections? That isn’t the case this time.
The officers were shocked to see that Howlett had been sitting on a handgun and had an MP5 submachine gun sitting on the back seat.
When cops searched Howlett’s car, they recovered 22 other guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Cops who searched the suspect’s home in Henderson found 30 more firearms, including automatic rifles, plus ammo, grenade launcher attachments and silencers.
Officers said Howlett made several threats going back years, a including a 2024 call where Howlett threatened a mass shooting.
Here’s a weird follow-up to a weird story. “Plano ISD Sued Over Arrests of High School Booster Club Mothers.”
Mothers from a Jasper High School choir booster club filed a lawsuit claiming Plano Independent School District (ISD) participated in civil conspiracy and had them falsely arrested.
The lawsuit, which names Laura Cervantes and the Jasper High School Choir Booster Club as the plaintiffs, describes the series of events that led to the filing.
Cervantes was elected as president of the booster club in 2019, and in June 2022 the club was filed as an incorporated nonprofit organization. The club utilized a Prosperity Bank account, and three directors, Cervantes, Krisinda Lingenfelter, and Maria King, assumed oversight.
Cervantes’ lawsuit states, “Neither Plano ISD, nor any of its employees, were members, officers, or employees of the organization” at that time.
The directors reportedly sought funding from Plano ISD for repairs in the theater, but allege that the district then flipped the script, asking the booster club to instead fund improvements. When they responded that repairs were not in the description of the club’s functions, Plano ISD claimed that the booster club was no longer acting in compliance with district guidelines and staged a coup, according to Cervantes.
The district disavowed the club and elected new leadership, despite the club operating as a legally separate entity from the district. The lawsuit claims that during that time, “Defendants continued to divert the Booster Club’s mail, kept it, opened it, and used its contents (namely bank statements).”
The lawsuit also claims that the newly elected booster club directors, along with the school’s fine arts director, subsequently went to Prosperity Bank in order to replace the original club directors as authorized signers on the account.
The lawsuit states, “These Defendants’ conduct likely constituted the crime of forgery under [the Texas Penal Code], because they intentionally presented documents intended to defraud the bank and harm the Booster Club by taking over its funds.”
Eventually, the bank notified the three moms that it would be closing the account, and they proceeded to take the check and deposit that money into another bank account at Vantage Bank in the name of the booster club. The check bounced.
In August 2024, a Plano Police Department detective executed a probable cause affidavit — which Cervantes claims was “based entirely off the knowingly false statements of each Defendant” — and obtained warrants for the arrests of Cervantes, Lingenfelter, and King “for the felony offense of theft over $2,500 but less than $30,000.”
They were booked into the Collin County Jail with their bonds set at $25,000 each.
A Collin County grand jury declined to indict the women “for any crime for want of probable cause, and the prosecution was terminated in Cervantes’s favor.”
Plano ISD released a statement about the legal drama, arguing that school-affiliated organizations, including booster clubs, “must follow established guidelines for financial accountability, annual audits and open communication with district leaders.”
The statement did not address the termination of the prosecution, or the district-led formation of the new booster club, but maintained, “Plano ISD did not file any suit against the former booster club- these proceedings were strictly between the current booster organization and the previously disbanded group.”
The statement by Plano ISD also detailed that they gave the $4,437.39 recovered from the old booster club’s account to the new club.
On May 27, the federal lawsuit was filed with Cervantes at the helm. Allegations cover 11 items, from false arrest and unreasonable seizure of property to violations of the rights to free association, free speech, petition.
The lawsuit alleges, “Plano Independent School District and its employees conspir[ed] with private citizens to assume control over a private non-profit organization, take control of its property and monies, and eventually, have the directors of that organization falsely arrested and publicly humiliated – all because the officers of a high school choir booster club would not bend the knee to an out-of-control public school district.”
It seems inexplicable that Plano ISD threw three booster club members in jail in order to steal their $4,437.39…
Jobs are down, more Minnesota fraud uncovered, a bunch of military action outside the Persian Gulf, an Austin jihad shooter, Noem gets the Old Yeller treatment, Bill Clinton remains Bill Clinton, and Microsoft, amazingly, manages to get even worse.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Also consider this your “Iran Strikes: Day 7” update with a smattering of news as well. There are reports that Kurdish forces have entered Iran from Iraq, but I’m not seeing sufficient evidence for that yet.
Interesting chart showing Iran has likely “blown its wad” on missiles and drones, as day by day fewer and fewer are being launched.
Update Numbers as of Mar. 6, 12.00 AM The numbers are rounded and compiled from various media reports, with a margin of error of ±10% 15% **Corrected previous Post there was a Mistake https://t.co/eDlVfc3nzApic.twitter.com/UiHAU0yNHe
The Supreme Court upheld the standard for reviewing asylum cases, keeping it in the hands of immigration agencies.
Yes, even the leftist justices agreed. 9-0.
“We granted certiorari to determine whether the Court of Appeals applied the appropriate standard of review under the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act],” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson. “We conclude that the statute requires application of the substantial evidence standard to the agency’s conclusion that a given set of undisputed facts does not constitute persecution.”
Top officials in Minnesota were made aware of fraud concerns surrounding government assistance programs as early as 2019 but failed to take action as billions of dollars were stolen and warnings piled up.
Former Minnesota state officials testified to the House Oversight Committee that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were first informed that the state’s social services programs had been compromised by widespread fraud in 2019 and 2020, according to a new report from the committee.
“Testimony obtained by the Committee reveals that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware of widespread fraud in social service programs, lied about their knowledge of the fraud, and retaliated against employees who dared to raise concerns. Instead of protecting vulnerable Americans, they handed over billions in taxpayer dollars to fraudsters and threw their own state employees under the bus,” said House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.).
Several different entities and state-level programs are implicated in Minnesota’s fraud scandal. The most prominent program is Feeding Our Future, which fraudsters targeted during the Covid era to steal $300 million from the Minnesota Department of Education that had been designated to provide food to poor children. Feeding Our Future is now dissolved and dozens of defendants have been convicted in connection with the scheme since 2022.
According to the committee report, Minnesota Department of Education officials first received allegations of fraud against Feeding Our Future from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2019. The USDA alleged Feeding Our Future was created with forged signatures and misled sponsored food distribution sites about certain federal requirements. Minnesota officials dismissed the allegations at the time. By April 2020, Walz and Ellison’s offices were briefed about the Minnesota Department of Education’s concerns regarding Feeding Our Future, Assistant Commissioner Daron Korte testified to the committee. State officials contacted the USDA about Feeding Our Future in late 2020, but the agency’s inspector general did not act, a failure that emboldened the scammers at Feeding Our Future.
The Oversight Committee report asserts that Minnesota officials could have suspended payments to Feeding Our Future but chose not to because of potential litigation and racism accusations. Minnesota officials blamed the USDA and Feeding Our Future for perpetuating the large-scale fraud. In March 2021, the Minnesota Department of Education stopped payments to Feeding Our Future, but resumed payments voluntarily the following month after a court hearing on the matter. A court order was never issued requiring the payments, contradicting Walz’s 2022 assertion to the contrary. The lack of a court order was confirmed during the course of the Oversight Committee’s investigation.
In early 2019, Walz’s administration became aware of fraud tied to two programs administered by Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, former agency commissioner Tony Lourey testified. Another former commissioner, Jodi Harpstead, testified that Walz’s administration believed fraud connected to a child care program run out of the Department of Human Services had already been resolved. But the Oversight Committee report references two auditor reports showing otherwise, both of which were issued in 2019. The Department of Human Services lacked fraud mitigation mechanisms and felt pressure to get money out the door to justify state appropriations, the committee found. Despite credible allegations of fraud, the agency failed to act on the warnings and unilaterally stop making payments to the social services programs in question.
The Oversight Committee’s report is based on testimony from nine top current and former state officials, documents and communications, and briefings with federal and state officials. The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office recently speculated that the interwoven fraud schemes totaled nearly $9 billion in misallocated funds. Of the fraud defendants, 85 percent of them come from Minnesota’s Somali-American immigrant community. Social services programs that provide food, child care, housing, and special education have all come under scrutiny as federal investigators unravel the fraud scheme.
I know it’s been easy to overlook in all the other military news this week, but Afghanistan and Pakistan have been going at it as well, though only at a border skirmish level rather than a full-scale conflict. Since the Pakistani ISI helped create the Taliban, this is what’s known as “blowback.”
Rene Campos, a registered sex offender, is seeking elected office in California – launching a campaign for Fresno City Council amid fierce backlash and renewed questions about whether someone with his record should hold public office.
Campos was arrested in 2018 following a cyber tip to the Central California Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. He was found in possession of child sex abuse material, according to court records. In 2021 he entered a no-contest plea to a single misdemeanor charge of possessing and controlling child pornography/child sex abuse material (likely under California Penal Code § 311.11). He served only one month in prison and a two year probation period.
Campos describes himself as a gay man who is running for office on the platform of “reduced crime and rehabilitation.”
Possession of child pornography is typically treated as a felony, even in a woke haven like California. How the Fresno candidate was able to make a deal for a misdemeanor charge and spend only one month in prison is a mystery, but this does help to confirm ongoing suspicions that California’s legal system is falling into steep decline.
California is notoriously soft on child sex abusers. Recently, a Sacramento parole board released Daniel Allen Funston, who was convicted in 1999 of sixteen counts of kidnapping and child molestation after a horrific crime spree in Sacramento County, during which he kidnapped, raped, and beat eight children ages 3 to 7.
Funston was originally sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus 20 years, but was set free at age 64 due to a California elderly inmate program (maybe he’ll run for office, too).
Data from 2022 shows that the Golden State released over 7000 child sex offenders after less than one year of incarceration. Interestingly, “digital blocks” were added to the Megan’s Law website that prevent more recent analysis.
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement provide warrants before violent illegal criminals are turned over to federal authorities, following the stabbing of a Virginia woman by an illegal immigrant with a long and violent criminal history.
Abdul Jalloh was charged with second-degree murder after Stephanie Minter was brutally stabbed in the neck at a Virginia bus stop. Jalloh had previously been charged more than 40 times, including for egregious crimes such as aggravated assault, malicious wounding, and rape. Prosecutors dropped 20 of the 43 charges against Jalloh. The Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office said the charges were dropped because Jalloh often chose victims who did not have permanent addresses, making the proceedings more difficult.
The Department of Homeland Security said Jalloh is an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone. He entered the United States in 2012.
“ICE previously lodged a detainer against Jalloh in 2020, and he was granted a final order of removal by a judge who found he could be removed to any country other than Sierra Leone,” DHS said in a statement. “This case illustrated the importance of third country removals to get criminal illegal aliens out of the U.S.”
Spanberger insists that in order for Virginia to work with federal authorities, ICE must provide a signed judicial warrant, regardless of the alien’s criminal history. DHS requested cooperation with Virginia and Spanberger to deport Jalloh following his alleged involvement in the fatal stabbing.
“We are calling on Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and Virginia’s sanctuary politicians to commit to not releasing this murderer and violent career criminal from their jail without notifying ICE,” Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement. “This illegal alien’s murder of an innocent, beautiful American woman came less than 24 hours before Governor Spanberger’s demonization of ICE law enforcement. This heinous criminal is a perfect example of why we need cooperation from sanctuary jurisdictions and the importance of third country removals for the safety of the American people.”
What the Trump administration has done on the DEI front represents the beginning of a general reorientation of our politics away from wokeness. One need only survey what prominent leaders of the Left are saying about the political price the Democratic Party has paid on that score. What they are saying indicates a large political change, even if the Dems prove incapable of unmooring themselves from woke politics for the near future.
The first sign of this reorientation is a general shift in the popular mindset: the spell of woke politics has broken. This matters because it was always the way in which woke politics commanded assent in the citizens’ hearts and minds that was crucial. That assent has been questioned or denied now in a broad way, with the backing of public authority (Supreme Court decisions, executive orders, agency directives), and with widespread public support. Wokeness’s public hectoring, punitiveness, and censoriousness, and the extremism of many of its positions on the issues, is unpopular at the level of 70–30 or 80–20 opinion poll divides.
We ought to be confident, therefore, that the broken spell of wokeness augurs a permanent shift in our public life. What that means precisely, however, depends very much on how we understand wokeness and what is done going forward to ensure that woke excess does not return. Now, if, as many say, wokeness was the product of cultural Marxism (Christopher Rufo and a host of followers) or postmodernism (Jordan Peterson and another host of followers), then all that needs to be done is to combat bad ideas. On these interpretations, our universities in particular, and other cultural institutions where the influence of such ideas holds sway, need our attention. Certainly, cultural Marxism and postmodernism represent bad ideas, and the world would be a better place without their influence.
But if what wokeness represents above all is the explosive power of the civil rights revolution and the influence of an aggressive leftist interpretation of anti-discrimination politics, as another band of interpreters claims (I among them), then the task ahead is much bigger and much more difficult.
Trump’s anti-DEI measures, on this view, would represent only the first step in a broader campaign of civil rights reform. One could look long and hard without seeing much in the way of evidence for any such thing so far. Are these current efforts against DEI an illusion, a brief moment of political opportunism that will recede as public hatred of wokeness recedes—only to return in a few years when the next wave of anti-discriminatory passion rises up?
I don’t think that worry is justified. The anti-DEI campaign to date will have enduring consequences because even if it is not yet clear that what is at stake in DEI is civil rights politics, the current reorientation can only have the effect of raising our awareness of the role of anti-discrimination in our public life. This has begun on the all-important moral plane of civil rights politics. Precisely by breaking the spell of its puritanical commands, our anti-woke moment is reworking something essential to civil rights politics. Because public morality is the crucial filter of the human mind, a shift at this level will change what we see, what we think, and what we think we can say. Anti-woke sentiment, backed by changes in the law, is providing a moment of political, cultural, and mental freedom that will necessarily lead, after many decades during which this was not possible, to a general reappraisal of the moral power and the meaning of the civil rights revolution.
Sources have identified the alleged gunman as 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne to Nexstar’s KXAN and The Associated Press…
Diagne is originally from Senegal, according to multiple people briefed on the investigation. One of the people told the AP that Diagne came to the U.S. in 2006 and was a naturalized U.S. citizen…
Austin mass killer captured on video wearing ‘Property of Allah’ hoodie during rampage.
“Dallas Democrats Decide To Let DA Creuzot Go. With no Republican in the race, Democrat primary winner Amber Givens will become Dallas County’s next district attorney.” Creuzot was yet another Soros-backed DA, so maybe Dallas Democrats are ever so slowly moving back to sanity.
I’m just going to embed this Asmongold clip of Bill Clinton’s Jeffrey Epstein deposition without comment.
President Trump announced Thursday that Senator Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) will replace Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary.
The announcement comes after Noem struggled to stand up to a public grilling by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who pressed the former South Dakota governor on Tuesday about a $220 million ad campaign contract that was subcontracted to one of her longtime allies. Trump was furious at Noem for insisting during the hearing that he had personally approved the contract and began floating Mullin’s name as a potential replacement, National Review first reported early Thursday.
Mullin will replace Noem effective March 31. It’s unclear whether Trump plans to nominate Mullin to serve in the position permanently or whether he will serve in an acting capacity, sparing him the necessity of Senate confirmation.
“I am pleased to announce that the Highly Respected United States Senator from the Great State of Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, will become the United States Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), effective March 31, 2026,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The current Secretary, Kristi Noem, who has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!), will be moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere we are announcing on Saturday in Doral, Florida. I thank Kristi for her service at ‘Homeland.’”
Already under significant scrutiny due to bipartisan criticism of her handling of Trump’s deportation agenda, Noem ran into further trouble this week during a series of hearings in which multiple lawmakers, most notably Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, asked her to explain why the agency had awarded a $220 million contract to a firm that was founded just days before, without ever opening up the bid to a competitive process. Kennedy also pointed out that part of that ad campaign was subcontracted to a strategy firm owned by Ben Yoho, the husband of former DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.
A $220 million no-bid ad contract isn’t just wasteful, it’s actively criminal.
More defeats for the gambling lobby: “Two House Chairs Defeated by Challengers. State Reps. Cecil Bell and Stan Kitzman were ousted by Kristen Plaisance and Dennis Geesaman respectively.”
Plaisance ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility, securing Texas’ elections, and defending state sovereignty.
Bell’s campaign and allied groups—including the Las Vegas Sands–backed casino lobby and Texans for Lawsuit Reform—reportedly spent more than $1 million attempting to defend the incumbent.
Bell, who chairs the Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, had been censured by the Montgomery County Republican Party last year.
Incumbent State Rep. Stan Kitzman of Brookshire has been defeated by Dennis “Goose” Geesaman for the GOP nomination for House District 85. Kitzman served as chair of one of the House’s subcommittees on appropriations.
Geesaman, a pilot and Air Force Academy graduate, retired as a Lt. Colonel. He served five terms on the Flatonia City Council and later served as mayor.
While Texans for Lawsuit Reform and casino-funded PACs backed Kitzman’s reelection campaign, Geesaman ran on a platform of ending magnets for illegal immigration, DOGE-ing Texas, and supporting parental rights.
Kitzman also recently came under investigation for his paid work for a local governmental entity while serving in the Legislature.
Kitzman also voted to impeach Paxton, so I think we’re well rid of both of them.
The war against tranny madness continues. “Paxton Opinion Targets Therapists Behind Child ‘Psychological Transitioning.’ Psychiatric providers who help facilitate prohibited treatments may be barred from receiving public funds and could risk losing their licenses.”
Samsung Electronics America Inc. is one of five companies that have been accused by Attorney General Ken Paxton of collecting and monetizing consumers’ viewing data on smart TVs.
Following the agreement, Samsung will now make changes to not only halt the collection of viewing data without consent, but also update their TVs to include disclosures and consent screens.
Heard from some state agency people that this was coming: “Texas Dismantles DEI-Oriented HUB Network. The comptroller’s office has ended race- and sex-based preferences in state contracting.” Good.
“Former Warren Campaign Worker Says the U.S. Must Be ‘Abolished’ to Atone for Death of Ayatollah Khamenei…Calla Walsh, the communist activist who campaigned for Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Bernie Sanders, and others, said the only way to exact “justice” is the complete deconstruction of the U.S. and Israel.” What percentage of the ideological core of the Democrat Party are actively communist?
One thing that reportedly helped kill Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Brothers: GOP congressmen visiting Netflix headquarters and discovering tampons in the men’s room.
Microsoft seems to be going from bad to worse: “Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser… for your own convenience, embeds Edge into AI assistant, ignores questions about opt-in.”
Microsoft is rolling out a Copilot update to Windows Insiders that embeds web browsing directly into the assistant, opening links in a side panel rather than launching your default browser.
The plan is that users of the Copilot app in Windows will show content in the assistant’s window “so you don’t lose context.”
Copilot will also (with permission) have access to the context of tabs opened in that conversation, so the assistant can look across them when responding to user prompts. Opened tabs will be saved with the conversation so that they can be returned to, and, if a user chooses to enable it, passwords and form data can be synchronized.
Enabling password and form data synchronization might give some users pause for thought, particularly after the Windows Recall fiasco, but users worried about Redmond slurping data should probably consider an alternative to Windows anyway.
At first glance, it looks like embedding Edge into Copilot via the WebView2 control is an attempt to steer the user away from their default browser. Convenient, yes. Good for competition, possibly not. We asked Microsoft whether this would be an opt-in experience and which browser was being used, but, other than acknowledging receipt of our questions, the company did not respond.
It looks like this is going to be limited to corporate users for now, but launching web links without user control strikes me as a huge attack vector for malicious code. (Previously.)
New Zealand “Lesbian Navy Captain Faces Court Martial After $100M Ship Ran Aground, Caught Fire, Sank.” Since that happened all the way back in 2024, they’re certainly not rushing to justice…
Apple has some new computers out, so here’s M5 Pro vs. M5 Max benchmarks. My trailing edge consumer ass is still on an Intel-based MacBook Pro…
“Japanese companies are paying older workers to sit by a window and do nothing—while Western CEOs demand super-AI productivity just to keep your job.” Seems like there should be a happy medium between those two extremes…
If you have a primary care physician, chances are you have MyChart, which seems to have a monopoly on the online medical records portal business. Oddly enough, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has noticed that monopoly as well.
Texas is suing the electronic medical records conglomerate that owns the MyChart system, Epic Systems, alleging that it both has a monopoly on the industry and makes it difficult for parents to access their children’s medical records.
The antitrust lawsuit was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on December 10 in Tarrant County district court. It accused Epic of “inserting” itself as the “gatekeeper” of patient data, by “locking up” hospitals into its electronic health records (EHR) systems, then dictating when and which individuals can access said data.
As described on the Epic Systems website, the company has “more than 325 million patients” with electronic records. Both major Texas medical networks and hospitals — such as Texas Children’s Hospital and Memorial Hermann — and smaller clinics use Epic’s various services, including MyChart.
It represents more than 90 percent of all U.S. citizens, court documents note.
The suit similarly highlights that Epic houses more than 325 million patients’ medical records within its databases, stating that its “strategy” has been “inordinately successful” and has operated as a monopoly in the EHR industry.
My health provider uses MyChart, but I’ve never consented for them to use it for me. Call me paranoid, but I believe that ObamaCare incentivized newly cartelized medical providers to centralize record keeping so the federal government could suck in all that information for themselves, because that’s the sort of thing socialists love to have on file as a weapon to use against the proles. Naturally, I’m agin it…
ObamaCare bites the dust, Eurocensors try grind Twitter under its bootheel, a lot of Ukrainian drone and missile strikes, Keir Starmer’s fingerprints are all over lots of censorship efforts, some homegrown Austin fraud, and the history of human occupation of north America just got a radical update.
On Thursday afternoon, the Senate rejected extending Obamacare subsidies, refusing to let taxpayers mask the skyrocketing costs of health insurance premiums caused by Barack Obama’s 2010 signature legislation.
“Senators rejected a Democratic bill to extend the subsidies for three years and a Republican alternative that would have created new health savings accounts — an unceremonious end to a monthslong effort by Democrats to prevent the COVID-19-era subsidies from expiring on Jan. 1,” the Associated Press reported. “Ahead of the votes, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York warned Republicans that if they did not vote to extend the tax credits, ‘there won’t be another chance to act,’ before premiums rise for many people who buy insurance off the ACA marketplaces.”
Just a reminder that Schumer and the Democrats got absolutely nothing from their shutdown stunt. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Europe is ramping up its war on free speech by targeting X with fines for not submitting itself to censorship regulations demanded by the European Union.
The EU levied a fine of $140 million against X, the first-ever penalty under Europe’s Digital Services Act. Europe decided that the website’s blue checkmark symbol is misleading, that it won’t give Europe access to data that will help it investigate free speech on the platform, and that it does not have a proper catalog of the ads available on the platform for Europe to examine.
This has been part of a two-year pressure campaign against X, as Europe does not believe in free speech, and X CEO Elon Musk has reduced the level of censorship on the platform. Europeans can claim that this isn’t about free speech but “transparency” all they want, but the 2023 investigation opened into X was focused on “disinformation” and “illegal content.” Now, Europe wants access to a list of X’s advertisers, wants its “researchers” to have access to the website’s algorithm to scrutinize “algorithmic bias” and “hate speech,” and to alter how the website runs with respect to its blue checkmark system.
“Note the Soros connection. As Mike Benz has repeatedly highlighted, the co-mingling of Soros and the Blob is real.”
Revelations that aren’t even shocking anymore: “Black Lives Matter Director Spent Millions in Donations on Homes, Shopping, Vacations, Indictment Alleges.”
Oklahoma City Black Lives Matter Executive Director Tashella Sheri Amore Dickerson has been charged with 20 counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering after allegedly spending millions in donations on personal indulgences.
Dickerson took over as the director of Black Lives Matter OKC (BLMOCK) in 2016 and since 2020 has raised more than $5.6 million for what donors believed was a national bail fund. The bail fund was also supplemented by grants through the Community Justice Exchange, Massachusetts Bail Fund, and Minnesota Freedom Fund.
The indictment alleges that from June 2020 to October 2025, Dickerson used at least $3.15 million in bail fund donations and grant money to supplement her lifestyle. Dickerson allegedly embezzled the funds to pay for personal shopping sprees, $50,000 in food and grocery delivery, trips to Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, as well as a personal vehicle and six Oklahoma City properties registered in her name.
The indictment explains that Dickerson allegedly used interstate wire communications to send false reports to Alliance for Global Justice, a fiscal sponsor to BLMOCK, which only permitted the group to use its funds in ways compliant with its 501(c)3 nonprofit status. Dickerson, however, did not disclose how she was allegedly using the funds for personal gain.
If convicted, Dickerson faces up to 20 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine per count of wire fraud. For each count of money laundering, she faces ten years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, or twice the amount of criminally derived property.
So was there any #BlackLivesMatter director who wasn’t using donated money as their personal piggy bank?
The scientific journal Nature has retracted a paper published in April 2024 that overestimated the economic effects of climate change and influenced central banks worldwide to create risk management scenarios.
The article predicted a 62% drop in worldwide economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were to continue without reduction.
On Wednesday, the three scientists who worked on the study retracted it, citing “substantial” issues with the paper.
The climate study’s findings were undermined by an article published by a separate team of economists earlier this year in Nature, calling into question problems with the data for Uzbekistan that skewed the climate study’s conclusions.
According to the New York Post, if the numbers for the Central Asian nation were excluded from the data set, the projected economic decline of 62% would actually be a far less catastrophic 23%.
The problem is that the faulty numbers, which was nearly 3 times typical estimates, had generated headlines and excitement among policymakers around the world including the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank.
The study was also used last year, to model the expected impact of climate change by the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS).
The NGFS is a worldwide network of central banks and financial supervisors with more than 150 members across nearly 90 countries.
Members of the NGFS include the People’s Bank of China, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England – and, until earlier this year, the Federal Reserve.
The climate study’s authors, Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann and Leonie Wenz of the Potsdam Institute in Germany, reviewed and amended their paper over the summer in light of the discrepancy and the retracted the study after acknowledging that their errors were “too substantial for a correction.”
“Oopsie! Sorry to make you destroy your economy over nothing!”
“Clandestine Campaign To Defund ZeroHedge, The Federalist & Breitbart Traced To Kier Starmer Operation.”
Very early into the COVID-19 pandemic, ZeroHedge suggested that a little-known Chinese lab in Wuhan might know something about the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe. As a result, and as you know, we were subject to an intense demonetization / deplatforming campaign that included getting kicked off of Twitter, PayPal, Facebook and other platforms, dropped by our advertisers, and targeted by MSM hit pieces which colluded with foreign ‘watchdogs’ to inflict maximum damage.
These same groups also targeted outlets including The Federalist and Breitbart over various reporting, which suffered similar fates.
Now, thanks to a new book by investigative journalist Paul Holden that builds on reporting by Matt Taibbi, Paul Thacker and others, we learn that the origin of these campaigns, launched years before the pandemic, was none other than UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s political machine, which began targeting left-wing outlets speaking critically of Starmer such as The Canary, and then went after conservative outlets in America – just in time for the 2020 US election.
Documents and internal accounts, many drawn from newly disclosed materials, reveal a coordinated project that operated behind a veil of anonymity, misdirection, and unreported political financing.
This murky operation known as the Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) was launched and resourced through a think tank, Labour Together, that would later be fined for failing to declare £739,000 in donations between 2018 and 2020. Said funds helped underpin this clandestine anti-media strategy which affected news outlets from the UK to the United States.
At the center of the effort was Morgan McSweeney, a political strategist who has since become Starmer’s chief of staff and, according to public commentary by prominent journalists, one of the most powerful unelected figures in the modern Labour Party.
The newly disclosed materials reveal that SFFN was not in fact some grassroots, anonymous activist collective it claimed to be, but a political weapon forged by senior Labour figures and funded by millionaire donors, including individuals active in pro-Israel political advocacy.
The goal: destabilize independent media ecosystems aligned with Labour’s left under Jeremy Corbyn, elevate Starmer’s leadership bid, and delegitimize outlets – domestic and foreign – that threatened the faction’s consolidation of power.
Publicly, SFFN claimed to be run by anonymous activists. Privately, it was shaped by McSweeney and operated from the same small office suite in South London that housed Labour Together.
SFFN ultimately migrated under the umbrella of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organization that grew out of a corporate shell once controlled solely by McSweeney.
British political operative and CCDH head Imran Ahmed
CCDH would later present SFFN as one of its signature initiatives.
Three Fronts of a Political Offensive
The documents reported by Holden reveal a three-part strategy that reshaped the British political landscape – and reverberated into U.S. media and politics. In a nutshell, this is how the sausage was made:
Destabilizing Jeremy Corbyn’s Leadership
SFFN’s narrative interventions were designed to amplify an “antisemitism crisis” that dogged Corbyn, boosting controversies and legitimizing a media ecosystem hostile to Labour’s left. This influence work aligned directly with the political interests of the centrist faction preparing for a post-Corbyn future.
Engineering Starmer’s Rise
Labour Together later claimed credit for helping deliver Starmer’s 2020 leadership victory, with McSweeney acting as his campaign chief. After Starmer won the July 2024 general election, McSweeney formally became chief of staff, solidifying the faction’s institutional dominance.
Silencing Dissenting Media
SFFN’s most aggressive project was an astroturf campaign against media outlets perceived as ideological threats. Targets spanned both the left (such as The Canary and Evolve Politics) and the right, as noted above.
In each case, the tactic was the same: identify advertisers appearing on targeted sites, publicly shame them through social media threads, and provide tools – including downloadable blocklists – to automatically exclude those outlets from programmatic advertising networks. The effort succeeded in devastating the business model of some targets; others survived but saw sustained pressure.
Corbyn is a dirty commie fossil who would have been a disaster as PM, but it looks like Starmer is a far nastier piece of work.
More UK rape gang coverup: “A former Metropolitan Police officer was accused of being involved in a London paedophile ring while serving with the force, but the case was ‘brushed under the carpet’ and ‘covered up,’ an LBC investigation has discovered.”
The Met launched a criminal investigation at the time into the allegations made by one of the complainants. She said the officer had abused her multiple times as a child and shared her with other “important men” at a hotel in Park Lane in central London. LBC understands the other men included an MP and a judge.
The victim also claimed that the officer targeted other “pretty girls” who were in the care system over several years.
LBC can reveal the officer was allowed to retire as a Custody Sergeant while under investigation. In 2012, officers under criminal investigation could only retire with permission from a senior officer.
LBC used to be London Broadcasting Company. (Hat tip: Instapundit.”)
The U.S. seized a large oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela as it traveled to Cuba.
“As you probably know, we’ve just seized a tanker on the coasts of Venezuela, large tanker, very large, largest one ever seized, actually, and other things are happening, so you’ll be seeing that later, and you’ll be talking about that later with some other people,” President Donald Trump said at the White House.
President Trump: “As you probably know, we just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela — a large tanker, very large.” pic.twitter.com/I51NenxoIP
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 10, 2025
One reporter asked Trump what would happen to all the oil.
“We keep it, I guess,” responded Trump.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the FBI, DHS, and the Coast Guard, with help from the Defense Department, executed the search warrant:
Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations. This seizure, completed off the coast of Venezuela, was conducted safely and securely—and our investigation alongside the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the transport of sanctioned oil continues.
Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. For multiple… pic.twitter.com/dNr0oAGl5x
— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) December 10, 2025
The U.S. placed sanctions on Venezuela’s oil company years ago.
More blue city fraud: “Austin Energy employee allegedly paid $980K to ‘fictitious vendors,’ city auditor says.”
The Austin City Auditor’s Office released a report Tuesday accusing a local couple, both of whom previously worked for the city, of defrauding the city for approximately $980,000 by sending payments to allegedly fictitious businesses.
The report focuses on the alleged actions of Mark Ybarra, who worked as a facility service specialist for Austin Energy. He was issued a city credit card by his superiors for the procurement of necessary tools and materials, the audit said.
According to the report, he used the card to “pay fictitious vendors approximately $980,000 and fraudulently reported these transactions in City records.”
“The falsified invoices he submitted were ultimately discovered by his management in Austin Energy. Some of the fictitious vendors used contact information like addresses that connected them to relatives of Mark Ybarra, or Mark himself,” reads an email to KXAN from the auditor’s office.
According to the city auditor’s report, Ybarra allegedly made payments to 22 fictitious businesses using the card. He resigned from his job in October 2023.
A grand jury indicted Ybarra on Aug. 23. He now faces a felony charge of theft greater than $300,000.
His wife, former Austin Watershed Protection employee Ambrosia Ybarra, “refused to answer questions” from city auditors. She was indicted on Sept. 15 and charged with felony theft between $150,000 and $300,000. She resigned from her job in November, the report states.
Paramount looks at the proposed Netflix-Warner Brothers merger and says “not so fast.”
Paramount Skydance has made another offer to buy Warner Bros Discovery as it seeks to trump a rival plan from Netflix to buy the company’s studio and streaming networks.
Paramount, which is backed by the billionaire Ellison family, said it was making a direct offer to shareholders of $30 (£22.50) per share to scoop up the whole of Warner Bros, including its traditional television networks.
It said its proposal was a “superior alternative” to Netflix’s, delivering more cash upfront to shareholders and greater prospect of approval by regulators.
I don’t think either of them have the best interests of movie viewers at heart…
Speaking of Netflix, remember Carl Rinsch, the director hired to produce a science fiction TV show who instead took the money and plowed it into cryptocurrency? Guilty on all counts.
“Hundreds of Porsches in Russia were rendered immobile last week, raising speculation of a hack, but the German carmaker tells The Register that its vehicles are secure. According to reports, local dealership chain Rolf traced the problem to a loss of satellite connectivity to their Vehicle Tracking Systems (VTS). This meant the systems thought a theft attempt was in progress, triggering the vehicle’s engine immobilizer. Porsche HQ was unable to help or diagnose the nature of the problem.”
Draw Mohammed winner Bosch Fawstin write to say that Patreon has frozen his account and gives different answers as to why. If anyone has a good contact there you might drop him a line. He also put up a PayPal link for donations.
Scottish comedian and actor Stanley Baxter, who also served the British Army in Burma during World War II, has died at age 99. (Previously.)
Happy Anti-Communism Week everyone! (In addition, of course, to May 1st being one of two Victims of Communism Day.) The #SchumerShutdown ends with a whimper, a whole lot of SNAP fraud has been uncovered, more Democrats committing fraud, Chip Roy wants a complete immigration halt, Ukraine hits a bunch more Russian oil refineries, some semiconductor shenanigans, another company leaves Delaware for Texas, some tech companies in trouble, an interesting new pistol design, and a novel theory on “AI-related layoffs.”
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
As a side note, the mosquitos have been brutal the last few days. Possibly because it’s been a very warm (though largely dry) November, and the bats have already migrated south.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday night signed a continuing resolution at the White House that ends the record-breaking 42-day federal government shutdown.
The Senate passed the resolution on Monday and the House passed it earlier Wednesday evening. The resolution will keep the entire government funded through Jan. 30, and extends funding for military construction, Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, and Congress beyond that, through Sept. 30.
Trump slammed Democrats for causing the shutdown by refusing to go along with a clean continuing resolution for over a month, and urged voters to remember the party responsible for causing the six-week-long chaos during next year’s midterms.
“Republicans never wanted a shutdown and voted 15 times for a clean continuation of funding,” Trump said. “The Democrats shutdown has inflicted massive harm … So I just want to tell the American people, you should not forget this when we come up to midterms and other things. Don’t forget what they’ve done to our country.”
The resolution gives backpay to many federal workers and reinstates employees who were fired during the shutdown, but does not include an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies despite it having been a key Democratic demand in the shutdown. The subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year.
And what did Chuck Schumer get for shutting down large portions of the federal government for more than a month? Two things: “Jack” and “Squat.”
I hear that if you call Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, the hold music is Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.”
Last Tuesday night, Democrats were jubilant, convinced they had just inflicted the first of many consequential defeats upon their detested foes, President Trump and the Republican Party. And now here we are, six days later, and Democrats are once again disappointed, infuriated, and at each other’s throats.
For the past 41 days, Republicans have had 53 senators willing to reopen the government, joined by Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and “independent” Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats. But it requires 60 votes to cut off debate and bring the legislation to the floor for a vote, and thus to reopen the government, Republicans needed at least four more Democrats to change their mind.
Last night, five additional Democratic senators agreed to vote to reopen the government — and in the eyes of their fellow Democrats, effectively surrendered. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire shifted their positions.
Those eight agreed to reopen the federal government at current funding levels through January 30, and in exchange, all they needed was a pledge from Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota to hold a vote on legislation to extend the Obamacare exchange premium subsidies by the second week of December.
There are one or two other deal-sweeteners in there for Kaine, notably an attempt to reverse more than 4,000 federal layoffs the Trump administration announced in the shutdown, and language to prevent future layoffs through January 30.
Snip.
Republicans just got the government reopened in exchange for a promise of a vote — not even promise of passage! — and rehiring government workers who were on the job on September 30. That’s a very small price to pay, and Republicans didn’t have to get rid of the filibuster, the ultimate short-term gain, long-term loss for Republicans in the Senate.
Across three-fifths of the United States, the Trump administration has found half a million people receiving SNAP benefits twice over and 5,000 dead people receiving them. In deep blue states, the fraud is probably much worse.
It is important to clarify that 20+ states out of the 50 did not comply with the federal government’s request for information on SNAP beneficiaries, likely because they are trying to hide how many illegal aliens are illicitly receiving food stamps. So the horrifying numbers revealed by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, The Ingraham Angle, are actually incomplete, and will probably be much higher if the administration can make radical Democrat states provide the necessary data.
Snip.
The secretary continued to list off food stamp recipient statistics: “80% [are] able-bodied Americans, meaning they can work, they don’t have small children at home, they’re not taking care of an elderly parent. They can work, and they choose not to work, of course, because they’re getting significant benefits from the taxpayer.”
We need to restore shame to able-bodied adults living on the public dole.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A Texas congressman is proposing a “freeze” on all immigration until the federal government fixes the country’s broken system.
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R–TX) said Wednesday he is introducing a bill called the “Pause Act” that will freeze all immigration until Congress achieves certain objectives, including reforming chain migration and birthright citizenship and ending H-1B visas.
He said the nation’s record-high foreign-born population is creating “a cultural problem about who we are as Americans.”
Roy, who is in a four-way race to be the Republican nominee for Texas attorney general in 2026, explained his proposal on The Benny Show.
In addition to the immigration freeze and related reforms, Roy called for revisiting Plyler v. Doe, a case originating in Texas that resulted in a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring states to fund the education of illegal alien children.
Roy also said his bill would require vetting people for their adherence to Sharia law.
“Why are we importing any human being that is adherent to Sharia law, which is totally contrary to the Constitution, and our values, and Western civilization?” Roy asked host Benny Johnson.
“In Texas, we’ve been dealing with the brunt of the illegal immigration influence. But now we’re seeing, I think, the ramifications of the H-1B system and how it has been abused, in addition to chain migration and diversity visas, which we’ve been trying to fix for a long time, and we’ve been unable to do so,” said Roy.
Mostly agree with this, though there would probably have to be a way for individual exceptions to be made (say, a foreign Christian under a death threat from jihadists, or a Russian or Chinese defector, or a foreign NBA draft choice). But it should be so narrow as to require the personal approval of DHS Director Kristi Noem…
There are Somalis in Minnesota who wouldn’t vote for far leftist Somali Omar Fateh because he was from a different Somali clan, and they want members of the rival clan kicked out of the country…
They also hit multiple targets in Novorossiysk, including both the oil terminal and the S-300/400 system defending it. Also, there’s no way I can donate €100 right now, but I really want one of those “This Is Fine” patches…
Orchestrating Over 180 Anti-Trump Lawsuits Through CREW: As co-founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Eisen led hundreds of ethics complaints and lawsuits against the Trump administration, often perceived as partisan harassment that politicizes oversight and strains constitutional separation of powers.
Snip.
Involvement in USAID Funding Scandal: Accused of ties to $17M misappropriation via family-linked NGO, raising corruption concerns in foreign aid.
Plenty more at the link.
(Heavy sigh) Look, I’ve been avoid the whole stupid Tucker Carlson thing because he hasn’t been a particularly important part of the mediascape for a while, and plenty of other people were already dog-piling him. Yet, this week he seemed to turn up some pretty interesting information on would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks. Namely that he was a pro-Trump supporter…until he radically changed his tune in early 2020.
On July 19, 2019 Crooks writes: “Ilhan Omar and others are invaders and should honestly be killed and their dead bodies sent back.”
On July 20, 2018, Crooks writes: “If youre saying trump is a bad president you arent a patriot as trump is the literal definition of Patriotism”
Seven hours after that comment, Crooks writes: “I hope a quick painful death to all the deplorable immigrants and anti-trump congresswoman who dont deserve anything this countru [sic] has given them”
Later that evening he wrote: “Everyone of the Trump hat-ing democrats deserve to have their heads chopped of and put on steaks for the world to see what happens when you fuck with America”
These types of comments continued for months, “and became increasingly violent.”
“If any of the democratic candidates win. They wont be in there for long. Because unlike the dems we have guns and lots of them”
He also quoted Mao – writing “The only real political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
The Change:
In early 2020 as the pandemic shifted into the headlines, crooks “radically” changed – writing of “trumps stupidity.”
He then began to mock the idea of the deep state – writing that “The deep state is simply made up of anybody who dis-agrees with the right wing. Conversation over.”
In Feb. 2020, Crooks called out Trump supporters as “brainwashed,” and a “cult.”
Later that day, Crooks called Trump a racist.
And in April 2020 when the COVID panic was in full swing, Crooks became pro-lockdown, writing “It seems that you people don’t understand that sometimes Public safety comes before your Personnel rights.”
He then wrote: “…going to a chinese new years party in america isn’t putting you at risk for corona virus because believe it or not viruses don’t spread through race like Tucker Carlson probably told you.”
In May of 2020, Crooks called Republican concerns over voter fraud “ignorant.”
He then wrote a comment that sounded like a “digital manifesto,” Carlson reports.
“they only way to fight the gov is with terror-ism style attacks, sneak a bomb into an essential building a set it off before anyone sees you, track down any important people/politicians/military leaders etc and try to asasinate them. Any sort of head fight is suicide and even ambush/surprise attacks likely aren’t going to end well.”
Sounds like another “known wolf,” doesn’t it? And the assertion that “there’s no deep state” (combined with what else we know about the assassination) makes you go “Hmmm.”
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is pushing back on the idea that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare, has made health insurance costs more affordable, saying, “Obamacare makes everyone else poor.”
Lee shared a graphic, first posted by President Trump on Truth social, showing how major health insurance company stocks have performed since the ACA was enacted in 2010 to November 2025.
The seven major health insurance companies depicted on the graph show gains of anywhere from 414% to 1177% in their stock prices between March 2010 and November 2025.
Health insurance companies are making money hand over fist—not because they’ve discovered new & innovative ways of making Americans healthier, but because Obamacare insulates them from competition while giving them massive subsidies
Lee called out the insurance providers, noting that they’re “making money hand over fist” but not because they are providing “new & innovative ways of making Americans healthier.”
Instead, Lee says, these health insurance companies are prospering due to the bureaucratic barriers that prevent new competition and from massive subsidies from the federal government.
The Saudis are getting ready to purchase 48 F-35s.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff Dana Williamson was arrested Wednesday in an FBI corruption probe and charged with multiple counts of bank and wire fraud.
Federal authorities accused Williamson, 53, of participating in a scheme to funnel campaign money from former federal Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra into a personal account. Sean McCluskie, Becerra’s former chief of staff, was named as a co-conspirator.
“This is a crucial step in an ongoing political corruption investigation that began more than three years ago,” U.S. Attorney Eric Grant said in a statement. “As it always has, the U.S. Attorney’s Office will continue to work tirelessly with our law enforcement partners to protect the people of California from political corruption.”
Williamson and McCluskie stole $225,000 between February 2022 and September 2024 from Becerra’s dormant state campaign fund, the federal indictment says. The Department of Justice investigation into the matter began three years ago, under former President Joe Biden’s administration, FBI Sacramento Special Agent in Charge Sid Patel said.
“The news today of formal accusations of impropriety by a long-serving trusted advisor are a gut punch,” Becerra told local outlet KCRA 3.
Williamson was hit with 23 charges, including conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct justice, subscribing to false tax returns, and making false statements, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
Democratic political consultants are so money-hungry they’ll rake graft off other Democrats. Big fleas have little fleas…
Man, it sure seems like a lot of prominent Democratic politicians are committing mortgage fraud. ‘Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) was hit with a federal criminal referral for alleged mortgage and tax fraud related to his purchase of a $1.2 million home in Washington, DC, that he claimed as a primary residence.” As Dwight notes: “You may remember Eric Swalwell for such hits as ‘banging a Chinese spy‘” and “threatening to use nuclear weapons against gun owners.”
So a Chinese fraudster connected to Communist intelligence services wandered in from Canada and bought a trailer park next door to a stealth bomber base in Missouri.
This is not the opening line of a surreal joke.
Whiteman Air Force Base is home to our tiny fleet of B-2 bombers, and yet an RV park just a mile away “is one of several properties near U.S. military interests acquired by a web of shell companies, which are ultimately owned by a couple who live in Canada and belong to organizations controlled by disgraced Chinese tycoon and self-described former CCP intelligence ‘affiliate,’ Miles Guo,” according to a bombshell Daily Caller report.
Someone in the federal government needs to get this fixed. Get a warrant to toss the entire trailer park to see what spectrum warfare equipment they might be using, then seize the place under eminent domain for national security reasons.
BREAKING: The Attorney General of Kansas just charged Mayor Jose Ceballos of the City of Coldwater for illegally voting as a noncitizen in several elections.
Not only did he get elected city councilman & mayor as a noncitizen, he also voted. WOW! The six charges come immediately… pic.twitter.com/amhsJJvaZW
‘We now have tools, thanks to the current White House, that we haven’t had in over 10 years,’ said Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, ‘that we can check through the SAVE program, to find out if folks end up on our voter rolls. And they could be a legal resident, but they’re not a citizen. We want to make sure that gets clarified.’
Deport him.
Least you think I’m never critical of President Trump, I want to note that his trial balloon for 50 year mortgages is a really bad idea. It’s not a way to build wealth, and the only party getting rich off that deal is the banks. Financially, you’d be better off living in a van for a few years until you can afford a real mortgage.
This certainly has a whiff of scandal: “Houston ISD Sues Texas Attorney General to Block Release of Emails with California PR Firm. The district wants to keep communications with a PR firm from becoming public.”
Houston Independent School District (ISD) filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block the release of emails between the district and Los Angeles public relations firm Bryson Gillette.
Bryson Gillette is former Obama aide Bill Burton’s public relations firm run by Democratic operatives. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was a senior adviser there.
Bryson Gillette was involved with the district’s rebranding in May. Houston ISD’s Chief of Public Affairs and Communications Alex Elizondo told an advisory committee that the district had a brand identity that “isn’t inviting or super compelling.”
A Houston ISD spokesperson said the rebrand came at no additional cost to the district and coincided with the rollout of new district and campus website designs scheduled for August.
According to the suit, ABC13 News requested one month of emails between Houston ISD and Bryson Gillette on May 8, which the district received on May 9. On May 21, the district asked Paxton to withhold documents and submitted the required materials to the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) asserting attorney-client privilege.
The OAG issued a ruling on August 12, ordering Houston ISD to release the records and stating that attorney-client privilege did not apply.
Houston ISD filed a lawsuit in Travis County on September 11, looking to block the emails from release.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has repeatedly slurred a federal judge by name, echoing President Trump’s history of diatribes against judges even before the current Democrat started copying the former Democrat’s social media style and insulting nicknames.
The perceived contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination for president may cluck his tongue again when he sees the latest order from U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez in a lawsuit against The Golden State’s alleged mandate on school districts to hide from parents their children’s asserted gender identity at odds with sex.
The President George W. Bush nominee ordered state Attorney General Rob Bonta and the California Department of Education to “show cause” on why they should not be sanctioned for “misleading” Benitez so he would remove them from the suit by teachers who allege their school district muzzled them and parents of “gender incongruent children.”
The state defendants’ motions to dismiss and opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment claimed that CDE had “withdrawn and conclusively replaced” an FAQ page that contained the challenged policies, which they claimed was the “only basis” for being named defendants and thus made the case moot, Benitez wrote.
“However, evidence demonstrates that the CDE may have merely moved the challenged content of the FAQ page to a new, required ‘PRISM’ training module,” as documented by the plaintiffs’ lawyers at the Thomas More Society, the judge said, ordering state defendants to explain their behavior Nov. 17 in court.
“From day one, officials from the local school district all the way to the governor’s mansion have tried to deflect responsibility” but “have now been caught not only lying to California taxpayers but attempting to mislead the Court to escape accountability,” TMS Executive Vice President Peter Breen said in a statement.
Based on early voting and some voting day results, no candidate secured over 50 percent of the votes cast, so the two highest vote recipients will move on to the runoff election, the date of which remains to be set by Gov. Greg Abbott.
The North Texas Senate seat was vacated when former state Sen. Kelly Hancock (R-North Richland Hills) resigned and was appointed by Abbott to fill the vacancy as the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts.
Snip.
Wambsganss was endorsed early on in the race by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has vocally opposed expansion of casino gambling in Texas. She has also received support from Texans United for a Conservative Majority (TUCM), which opposes gambling expansion as well. Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a group not frequently on the same side of an electoral battle as TUCM, has also supported Wambsganss.
The Substrate startup has been doing the rounds in the news lately, thanks to its proposition of making chips using particle accelerators and X-rays instead of conventional EUV lithography, claiming it can eventually have angstrom-sized features at only $10,000 per wafer—in U.S. fabs, no less.
Oooo, where to begin? IBM tried experimenting with x-ray lithography in the 1980s and 90s, and found the rays were too energetic to use because they damaged wafers.
And technically, semiconductor equipment manufacturing already has particle accelerators: they’re called ion implanters and they’re used for gate dopants. Axcelis (formerly Eaton Semiconductor) and Applied Materials (both companies I worked for in the 1990s) make good money selling them, and there are a whole bunch of limits-of-physics reasons why you can’t use them for lithography. (Historical trivia: Applied Materials used to have their own in-house designed ion implanters, but their current offerings trace back to a competitor named Varian they bought in 2011.)
Those are bold claims, and an article by Fox Chapel Research (FCR) is seriously questioning whether they pay off.
The write-up is the first of two parts, and takes aim at not just the seemingly outlandish technological claims, but also at the track record of the venture’s founders, as well as the overall messaging on Substrate’s website. The start-up is backed by various investment funds, namely but not only Founders Fund, of whom Peter Thiel is part of.
The report says the founders are James and Oliver Proud, who reportedly have no experience in the semiconductor industry, nor do any of the investor funds. James’ latest venture was apparently the Sense sleep tracker, a product that had its inception on Kickstarter to the tune of $2.5m, but didn’t materialize until funding rounds raised over $50m. After release, the tracker was found to be borderline useless by reviewers and drew many comparisons to a scam.
ClowfishTV floats an interesting theory: A lot of those “AI-related” layoffs are just companies using that as an excuse to purge the woke from the ranks.
For more than half a century, Delaware stood as America’s corporate capital, renowned for its business-friendly laws, respected Chancery Court, and consistent legal rulings. But in recent years, leftist activist lawmakers and politicized judges have undermined that very foundation, sparking an exodus of major companies seeking stability and fairness to more welcoming states like Texas and Nevada.
On Wednesday morning, Coinbase joined the growing exodus, announcing on its website and in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal that it is moving its state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas.
“For decades, Delaware was known for predictable court outcomes, respect for the judgment of corporate boards, and speedy resolutions,” Grewal wrote in the op-ed.
However, he pointed out that recent inconsistent Chancery Court rulings and reliance on ad hoc legislative fixes do not create a sustainable business environment.
“Our decision to leave is about ensuring more predictable opportunities for the company, our shareholders, our customers and the new on-chain ecosystem we’re building,” he noted, adding, “Texas offers efficiency and predictability, in part thanks to recent corporate-law reforms that enhance governance flexibility and legal predictability.”
Grewal concluded, “Delaware wasn’t always the go-to choice for companies. At one point it was New Jersey, and before that New York. We’ve reached another inflection point in corporate law. The more states that can credibly attract companies, the better—and we’d like to see Delaware step up to stay in the mix. But as for Coinbase, you can find us in Texas….”
The exodus list from Delaware increases:
Tesla: Moved to Texas.
SpaceX: Moved to Texas.
Trump Media & Technology: Moved to Florida.
Dropbox: Moved to Nevada.
TripAdvisor: Moved to Nevada.
Roblox: Moved to Nevada.
Pershing Square: Moved to Nevada.
The Trade Desk: Moved to Nevada.
AMC Networks: Moved to Nevada.
Madison Square Garden Sports: Moved to Nevada.
Fidelity National Financial: Voted to move to Nevada.
So was a Delaware judge letting Elon Musk know how much he hated him for supporting Trump worth it?
“750-meter-long Chinese bridge partially collapses just weeks after opening.” From a landslide, but I’m betting the usual Chinesium/tofu drugs construction quality didn’t help…
At its Midlothian Data Center, alongside a number of state officials, Google announced a $40 billion data center infrastructure investment in Texas.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, said that the investment will go toward the construction of three data center campuses located in Armstrong and Haskell counties.
Armstrong County is southeast of Amarillo. Haskell County is north of Abilene. Both counties have a whole lot of nothing there.
“They say that everything is bigger in Texas – and that certainly applies to the golden opportunity with AI,” Pichai stated.
“This investment will create thousands of jobs, provide skills training to college students and electrical apprentices, and accelerate energy affordability initiatives throughout Texas.”
Gov. Greg Abbott said the new Google AI data center announcement is “a Texas-sized investment in the future of our great state.” U.S. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) were also in attendance, along with Congressman Jake Ellzey (R-TX-06) and a number of other local officials.
“Google’s $40 billion investment makes Texas Google’s largest investment in any state in the country and supports energy efficiency and workforce development in our state,” Abbott added. “We must ensure that America remains at the forefront of the AI revolution, and Texas is the place where that can happen.”
Google has already officially broken ground on two other data centers in the state: one in Midlothian in 2019, and the other in Red Oak in 2023. The technology company has since announced further investments into data and cloud infrastructure to the tune of $2.7 billion.
This most recent announcement of a $40 billion investment will focus on building out infrastructure to support the three new data centers. Some of that investment includes building up new and existing energy storage facilities, advanced water use operations, and partnering with universities to offer technology training and education.
My reservations about Google’s AI notwithstanding, that will offer a bunch of real jobs for real Texans…assuming the AI bubble doesn’t burst before they get built.
Speaking of tech firms in trouble, video game maker Ubisoft (makers of Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed games) has not only postponed an earnings report, they’ve suspended stock trading. I can’t recall a single instance where that was a good sign. The last time we mentioned Ubisoft, they were pissing off Japanese gamers for including a black samurai in one of their games…
Ian McCollum looks at the new Rideout Arsenal Dragon, a low-bore-axis, lever-delayed pistol. It’s funky looking and has some interesting features, including complete non-tool disassembly. However, the price point would make it way too expensive to consider even if I had a job, he experiences several firing malfunctions testing it (though it is a prototype), and I fear the tiny little tabs it uses may not hold up under heavy use. Still a pretty interesting design.
Illegal aliens continue raking in welfare benefits, the #SchumerShutdown continues, a look at the Democrats’ foreign paymasters, a jihad attack thwarted, cartels are enslaving American Indians in California in the name of weed, some Joe Rogan interviews, Nasty Nancy bows out, Kill Bill returns to theaters, and Bass Pro Shop Fight Club.
It’s astounding, the things we learn when the money runs out and governments actually have to start prioritizing for a change. As the Schumer Shutdown drags through Week Five with no end in sight, the country’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — aka “food stamps” — ran out of money on Saturday. And given who was taking, it’s a miracle that there was any money left at all.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins reported yesterday that earlier this year, “we told every state to send us their SNAP data so we could make sure illegal immigrants aren’t getting benefits meant for American families. 29 states stepped up. 21 blue states refused — and two SUED US FOR ASKING!”
That’s because we’re spending billions on benefits to illegal aliens.
My guess is that the Center for Immigration Studies — which bills itself as “low-immigrant” yet “pro-immigration” — was being a bit ironic with this headline: Illegal Immigrants To Be Hit Hard As SNAP and WIC Benefits Expire.
The organization’s 2023 analysis of government data showed that “households headed by illegal immigrants make extensive use of the welfare system, particularly food assistance programs.” CIS estimated that 59% of households headed up by an illegal are on one or more welfare programs, whether it’s cash, food assistance, Medicaid, or housing.
Read that again. We’re giving cash, food, healthcare, and housing to people who aren’t even supposed to be here.
Millions of them, in fact. Even though I could have sworn that Democrats insisted up and down that sort of thing never happened. No wonder 21 blue states didn’t want Rollins looking at their books.
Houston, we have a problem. A very expensive problem.
His suggestions: Require proof of citizenship for all welfare benefits, and ban junk food from purchase with EBT.
The Schumer Shutdown continues. Democrats offered a one year ObamaCare extension and Republicans told them to get stuffed. Republicans should counter-offer an extension of the subsidies for American citizens…but none for illegal alien, plus states are required to submit their benefits database so illegal aliens can be kicked off the program and deported. That would make it even more painfully clear Democrats favor illegal aliens over citizens when they refuse…
Foreigners not only are paying to promote liberal causes and by extension liberal candidates but foreigners are running their own candidates. The Squad has a couple of them and Minneapolis is about to get a Somali mayor.
Foreigners are funding the Indian who was born in Uganda and sent to New York City at some point. Now he’ll a jihadist-friendly communist—but if justice prevails, he may end up in prison instead of being in City Hall.
The New York Post reported last week, “Zohran Mamdani was hit with two criminal referrals Tuesday filed by a campaign finance watchdog accusing the lefty socialist of accepting illegal contributions from foreign donors.
“The Coolidge Reagan Foundation filed the referrals—alleging Mamdani may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and New York Election Code—with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office on Tuesday.
“The referrals were filed after The Post reported earlier this month Mamdani’s campaign raked in nearly $13,000 in contributions from at least 170 donors with addresses outside the U.S.—including one from his mother-in-law in Dubai.”
Ed Morrissey:
The Democrat Party has turned into the Globalist Party. Their constituency isn’t American voters; it’s the international cognoscenti, who want an America that submits to the “global community.” That is why Democrat leaders do not adapt their policies and positions to the clear consensus in the American electorate, because they have already adapted to constituencies outside the United States.
That isn’t the only institution orienting itself away from American constituencies, and for the same reason. Over the last several decades, Academia has seen billions of dollars flow into its coffers from places like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. There too, the money has pushed institutions to indoctrinate students into radical-Left globalist values and agendas. Universities have largely stopped providing foundational Western-civilization values and education in favor of revisionist propaganda about Western imperialism and colonialism. This in turn colors all of the institutions into which radicalized graduates enter and rise within those structures.
Jonah Goldberg, from 2009 (back before Trump broke his brain):
Liberalism has openly yearned to “Europeanize” American social policy for decades. Liberals point to European health-care systems, union rules, tax policies, industrial policy, foreign policy, and even sexual mores, and say: “We need to be more like them.”
This is a very old story. The founders of modern liberalism, led by Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts, were quite open about their effort to adopt a more European approach to political economy. The progressive leader William Allen White said in 1911: “We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause.”
But it was FDR’s New Deal that truly aimed to “assimilate the American into the ‘European’ political experience,” according to historian Daniel Boorstin.
After years of Democrats telling the American people that former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a thriving system, the glaring truth revealed now during the government shutdown is that not only has the ACA resulted in widespread fraud and allegations of kickbacks to insurance companies, the American people are footing the bill for subsidies to hide the fact that Obamacare is broken.
“Everything Obama told us was a complete lie,” E.J. Antoni told John Solomon during a special report on the government shutdown sponsored by the Association of Mature American Citizens.
Antoni, who serves as chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, continued: “When he said, ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.’ No you couldn’t. Obamacare made a lot of those health care plans illegal. He said, ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.’ No, it forced a lot of doctors out of business, and it forced a lot of doctors to no longer take most insurance.”
President Barack Obama repeatedly promised Americans during the rollout of the ACA — commonly known as Obamacare — that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” a claim intended to reassure Americans about the ACA’s impact on existing healthcare arrangements. However, millions of people lost access to their preferred and established physicians due to narrowed insurance networks and cancellations of plans which did not comply with the law’s new requirements, leading even left-leaning PolitiFact to name it the “Lie of the Year” in 2013.
Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., revealed the latest scandal within Obamacare. Bergman, speaking to Just The News, laid out the timeline for subsidies which were meant to lighten the burden for Americans but when unused, were pocketed by the insurance companies.
Bergman explained that “In 2010, the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. Then in 2014, ACA premium tax credits became available, meant to help families earning 100 to 140% of the federal poverty level – that was designed to help those folks. In 2021, through the ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act), Democrats temporarily extended and expanded those subsidies to everyone, regardless of income, for one year. In 2022, the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act), they extended the expansion again, but only through January 1 of 2026.”
Bergman emphasized that the expiration imposed by Democrats implicitly meant that the extension was not meant to be permanent. That extension expires and is what Democrats have shut down the government over. As Bergman puts it, “They’re blaming us, the Republicans, for letting their own temporary extensions expire.”
The largest surprise regarding these subsidies, is that they haven’t been going directly to patients. They’ve been going to insurance companies, according to Bergman. “Insurance companies’ profits right now are up something like 240+ percent. There’s something morally wrong with that. Not only is it shamefully wrong, but morally wrong.”
Bergman did not name any specific insurance companies.
“Millions of these so-called ghost enrollees, people who are technically eligible, but are unaware of it, never use these subsidies. The insurers pocket the difference.”
OpenSecrets reported that in 2012, the health insurance industry donated roughly $9.6 million to Democrats. In 2024, the industry donated almost $40 million to Democrats.
Five people between the ages of 16 and 20 were arrested Friday, CBS News has learned. Authorities say they were inspired by a former member of the Michigan Army National Guard who was arrested in May for allegedly planning an ISIS-inspired attack against a U.S. Army site in suburban Detroit.
(Just a reminder that Detroit suburbs like Dearborn Heights are majority-Muslim.)
The men were inspired by another “Michigan man” who was arrested in May:
Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said, 19, was accused of providing support for a planned attack on the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command facility at the Detroit Arsenal.
Democrats have been importing unassimilated Muslims into America for, what, 30 year now? 40? Who initiated the plan, and why?
Over 1,500 alleged criminal illegal aliens were arrested during a 10-day operation in Southeast Texas — including documented gang members, a convicted murderer, and over a dozen sexual offenders.
The Houston branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted the operation between October 22 and 31, arresting a total of 1,505 alleged criminal illegal aliens.
Among the arrests were 17 “documented gang members,” including an alleged Mexican Mafia gang member, who was convicted for raping and impregnating his minor sister and is wanted in Honduras for murder. A suspected MS-13 gang member was also among the arrested, after he “ran inside a local washateria, climbed through the ceiling panels to get on the roof and became wedged in a sign on the side of the building,” before being captured by Houston ICE.
Forty “aggravated felons” were reported as being among the 1,505 arrested, as were 13 sexual predators.
One of the arrested is Vongphachan Phothisome of Laos, who was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child. Similarly, an illegal alien from Honduras, Rony Andy Martinez Lopez, was convicted of “lewd and lascivious acts with a minor and cruelty towards a child.”
A comparable week-long operation conducted by Houston ICE in early September yielded about half the arrests as this October one, with 822 alleged criminal illegal aliens arrested last month.
Native American sovereignty and California’s policies that shield illegal immigrants have allowed Mexican drug cartels to swoop in on tribal lands of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, a confederation of several tribes, the sheriff said.
The valley, known for illegal marijuana grows on tribal lands, is remote and surrounded by forested mountainous terrain. It’s a patchwork of tribal lands and those sold off to private owners years ago.
[Mendocino County Sheriff Matt] Kendall, 56, grew up here in the 1970s. During the drive to Covelo, an isolated town in the valley, he talks about how the times have changed over the decades.
“Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it was a beautiful place—a lot of freedom here,” he said. “When we were kids, we’d be riding our horses and having fun. Every kid in this valley had a horse. We’d go out to the river. All of us had summertime jobs, hauling hay and cutting firewood.”
His nostalgic journey ends abruptly as he passes a burned-out building with murals of missing women on its walls—a stark reminder of the violence that plagues the valley. Other banners along the road display their names and faces, including that of Khadijah Rose Britton, a native American woman who, according to the FBI, was last seen in Covelo being kidnapped at gunpoint in 2018.
Today, Kendall says, “there’s a little bit of farming, and then just tons and tons of marijuana, and pretty much all of it is illegal.”
“We see a lot of Hispanics here when there is no work, no sawmill jobs, no grapes, no vineyards and not much logging. They’re all here taking orders to grow marijuana, and a lot of it’s happening on tribal lands.”
He estimates up to 80 percent of the illegal marijuana in Mendocino County is grown on tribal lands, based on aerial surveillance and satellite imagery revealing a vast network of illegal grow ops.
A blow against tranny madness. “Supreme Court Reinstates Trump Admin Requirement That Passports Reflect Biological Sex.”
Joe Rogan interviews Elon Musk, again. I have not remotely watched all three hours of it, but I don’t rule out posting clips from it in the future.
Speaking of Musk, Telsa shareholders just approved a $1 trillion pay package for him, assuming he hits certain metrics over the next decade. My guess is that’s a whole lot of pie in the sky, even for him…
Speaking of three hour Joe Rogan interviews, he did one with Billy Bob Thorton that just dropped. I’m sure I’ll watch all of that one as well…
Nancy Pelosi announces her retirement. She was able to force the abomination that was ObamaCare over the line, and grab a lot of taxpayer-funded pork for Democrats, but it’s doubtful her terms as Speaker resulted in lasting achievements for Democrats. She was bad, but if another Democrat manages to be Speaker in my lifetime, my default assumption is that they’ll be much, much worse…
A Washington Parish grand jury in Louisiana has indicted Democratic Bogalusa, Louisiana Mayor Tyrin Z. Truong on charges of malfeasance in office, public intimidation, and theft, according to the Bogalusa Daily News.
The indictment is part of what officials describe as an ongoing multi-agency investigation involving federal, state, and local authorities. Prosecutors allege Truong intentionally carried out his official duties unlawfully and knowingly allowed other city employees to ignore theirs. His arraignment is scheduled for November 10, 2025.
According to prosecutors, the case centers on claims that Truong misused Bogalusa taxpayer funds to pay a personal legal debt from a 2023 Louisiana public records lawsuit in which a judge ruled that Truong personally owed attorney fees and penalties after refusing to release public documents.
When the Bogalusa City Council denied his request to use public money, prosecutors say Truong threatened retaliation, vowing to overwhelm council members with records requests. Investigators allege he then pressured a city insurance vendor to issue a check labeled as a “reimbursement,” had it deposited into a city account, and ordered another check for the same amount to be written to himself.
Rookie mistake. Graft pros always have the check written to an intermediary cutout who withdraws the money and pays them in cash…
In 2022, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) announced a plan to give $715 million in taxpayer cash and tax incentives to lure Gotion, a Chinese battery maker, to rural central Michigan. She did it in the midst of a reelection campaign so she could fire off a press release claiming credit for 2,600 “good-paying jobs.”
She didn’t mind the fact that this proposed one-square-mile plant would be located less than 100 miles from an Army and National Guard training facility called Camp Grayling. The real irony is that the U.S. military has been training the Taiwanese military at Camp Graying for years to repel a Chinese invasion. Our governor was going to pay the CCP to operate a plant in the middle of the state. Genius!
Local residents rose up. Yes, of course, because they objected to the possibility of Chinese spies roaming around their community. But also because they resented the way in which the project was unveiled. Elected officials signed nondisclosure agreements with economic development agencies and then said they were legally bound from sharing details with the residents footing the bill.
The more questions citizens had, the more obstinate company, township, and state officials became. Green Charter Township is made up of normal people: farmers, small business owners, and the like. James Chapman, the chief project proponent and former township supervisor, quickly lost his patience in meetings and yelled at the rubes who had the temerity to attend and voice their opinions. They would yell right back. The massive project, shrouded in arrogant secrecy, bitterly divided the small community.
It reached a boiling point when township officials who were supporting the project either resigned or were overwhelmingly recalled. A new board was elected, and they went about doing the due diligence that taxpayers expect elected officials to pursue for such an expensive and disruptive project.
The CCP-linked company sued the new board, driving up massive legal bills for the tiny community. The company didn’t want to wait for environmental approvals, tearing down trees and homes. The community continued fighting, even employing President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Trump publicly opposed the project. Vance held a campaign rally across the street.
When they took office in January, they changed former President Joe Biden’s scam electric vehicle mandates, and the whole racket collapsed. It was the beginning of the end for the Gotion project.
Last week, the state of Michigan announced it was withdrawing the promise of $175 million in taxpayer cash, although $50 million had already been delivered. It’s unclear whether taxpayers will receive an accounting of where that money went.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Voting fraud alert. “North Carolina Republicans say texts show that local Democrats are paying for people’s votes.”
The North Carolina Republican Party referred an alleged vote-buying scheme to the State Board of Elections for investigation on Friday, claiming that a voter had been offered $100 to vote for Democratic candidates in the Wilmington City Council election.
‘This is a troubling allegation and an egregious affront to our democracy and an attempt to buy votes in exchange for cash,’ NC GOP Chair Jason Simmons said in a press conference. ‘The North Carolina Republican Party stands committed and steadfast in its determination for free, fair and transparent elections.’
“FAA Orders Flight Cuts at Texas Airports as Democrat-Led Shutdown Deepens. The FAA will cut flights by 10 percent at 40 of the nation’s top airports due to staffing shortages among air traffic controllers.”
The Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently signed Addendum No. 9 to their 2019 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), paving the way for faster follow-on licensing of advanced nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel technologies.
This agreement, signed Oct 24th and effective immediately, comes as major concerns have been raised by reactor development companies and industry observers regarding the double work that may be required of developers when they bring their tested products over to the NRC. Demand for clean, reliable energy by data centers and major industrial companies has created a stronger need for change in the path to reactor design commercialization, with companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon signing long-term offtake agreements with reactor operators Constellation, NextEra, and Talen.
The addition to the MOU comes from the directives out of Trump’s executive orders signed back in May of this year. From section 5.d of the executive order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”:
“Establish an expedited pathway to approve reactor designs that the DOD or the DOE have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely. NRC review of such designs shall focus solely on risks that may arise from new applications permitted by NRC licensure, rather than revisiting risks that have already been addressed in the DOE or DOD processes.”
Surprisingly, the DOE and NRC took the executive order one step further and included a streamlined licensing process for nuclear fuel facilities as well. It becomes less surprising when we remember the current administration has highlighted multiple times the desire to reduce the reliance on foreign nuclear fuel supplies. Even with the Russian uranium import ban, the US is still importing over a fifth of the required enriched uranium from Russia through last year. The US government is looking to expand the domestic capacity of every step in the fuel chain as quickly as possible.
Faster, please.
“Top 20 Theories on Why the EU Committed Cultural Suicide.” They’re not mutually exclusive. And the piece needs an entry for cultural relativism/Frankfurt School and a Gramscian “war of position” against civil society.
Digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation. Home-alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we now seem to be more on our own. (Not to mention: meaner and stupider, too.)
It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death1, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.
Snip.
Short-form video is indistinguishable from what today’s youth consider the definition of American success. For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they most want to be when they grow up is an “influencer.”
When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television.
I’m not free from guilt myself. I only turn on my TV one day a week, but I watch waaaaaaay too much YouTube. (Previously.) (Hat tip: Greg Ellifritz via Dwight.)
GM to iPhone users: Drop dead. “General Motors is dropping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support across all of its brands—Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC.”
“Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter.” “If Microsoft owns 27 percent of OpenAI, it stands to reason under equity accounting that it bears 27 percent of OpenAI’s losses. Microsoft’s admission that it shaved $3.1 billion off its net income to account for its share of OpenAI losses therefore suggests OpenAI lost about $11.5 billion during the quarter.”
“Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR unites Volume 1 and Volume 2 into a single, unrated epic—presented exactly as he intended, complete with a new, never-before-seen anime sequence.”
Coming to theaters in December. If I wasn’t in financial turtle mode, I’d probably go out and see it…
Senate Democrats, lead by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, keep blocking a continuing resolution that would reopen large swathes of the federal government because they insist on continuing ObamaCare subsidies for illegal aliens. To this end, they’ve voted to keep the government shut down thirteen times. Republicans all voted to reopen the government, as well as “Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania” and “Independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats.” That makes the Republican bill to reopen the government the bipartisan bill.
In response to Democratic senators keeping the part of the government that supplies them with free food shut down, several Democrats on Tik-Tok, many visible obese, are threatening to loot grocery stores. Like the many businesses burned down during the #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa riots of 2020, the businesses so looted would no doubt be stores in deep blue areas of deep blue cities, meaning the people they would overwhelmingly be harming would likely be other Democrats. (Or people too apathetic to vote. Or non-voting felons.)
Now, I am making the assumption that the people pledging to commit crimes to support their perceived absolute right to free stuff from American taxpayers are, in fact, Democrats. There may indeed be a few down-on-their-luck Republicans impacted by the lingering effects of the Biden Recession that have had to rely on government handouts to feed their children, but they don’t seem like the type threatening to break the law. I’m also assuming those would-be looters are not Libertarians, as none of them strike me as the sort to have Milton Friedman books in their apartments.
So unless Republicans give in on subsidizing illegal aliens, Democrats will continue to hurt Democratic voters by refusing to let the federal government subsidize food for Democrats.
Hell of a plan there, Chuck.
But it’s clear that the crazy Tik-Tokers will be getting free food one way or another. if they carry through on their threats, many of them might be getting fed via their three hots and a cot down at the local hoosegow…
I generally avoid stories that everyone else is talking about, but I thought it worth pointing out that one reason Chuck Schumer has sleepwalked into this extremely ill-advised (for Democrats) shutdown over extending ObamaCare subsidies for illegal aliens is that George Soros is backing it.
A left-wing activist group that received millions of dollars from the Soros family’s organization is spearheading a pressure campaign to push Democratic senators to vote against funding the government and force a partial shutdown.
Indivisible — the organization behind many of the recent “No Kings” protests and other demonstrations part of the so-called “resistance” against President Donald Trump — has embarked on a recent effort to goad Senate Democrats to not come to a bipartisan funding agreement with their Republican colleagues and the president. The group’s website currently hosts a form enabling people to easily contact their Democratic senators by phone, complete with a script of what to say. (RELATED: Democrats Reportedly Quietly Planning Luxury Getaway Escape To 5-Star Resort Despite Looming Government Shutdown)
The group’s non-tax-deductible entity, Indivisible Project, has received a total of $7.6 million in grants from the Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) over the past eight years, according to Indivisible’s website. OSF is a grantmaking network which left-wing billionaire George Soros founded in 1993 and his son, Alexander Soros, currently chairs.
Snip.
Senate Democrats led by embattled Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have thus far refused to support Republican-passed CRs that do not include a litany of left-wing policy proposals.
Snip.
After Schumer and nine other members of the Senate Democratic Caucus voted with Republicans to break the filibuster on the March spending bill, Indivisible publicly called for Schumer to step down as the caucus’ leader and even put together an event where people wrote retirement cards addressed to him.
Right after Schumer’s March decision to work with Republicans to keep the government open, Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on the record blasting him, fueling speculation she may challenge him in New York’s 2028 Senate election. A late March poll by left-leaning firm Data for Progress showed Ocasio-Cortez leading the longtime incumbent by nearly 20 points in a hypothetical matchup.
The House on Sept. 19 passed a GOP-backed clean CR to fund the government through Nov. 21 — with the support of only one Democrat. However, it fell well short of the 60 required votes to bypass a filibuster in the Senate on the same day.
Meanwhile, the Senate rejected a Schumer-backed counter-proposal along party lines, also on Sept. 19. This Democratic-backed CR would have reversed about $1 trillion in cost savings of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA), nixed language preventing illegal immigrants from receiving healthcare subsidies and undid the OBBA’s new Medicaid work requirements.
So Democrats are shutting down the federal government because Soros money wants them to, becaause one of the hills they’re willing to die on is taxpayer subsidies for illegal aliens, and because Schumer is scared of being primaried by AOC…in 2028.
