Iran lashes out again and gets pounded even harder for its troubles, Fauci’s diary validates just about everything conservatives have been saying about him for the last six years, DSA is open about wanting to destroy the Constitution, Ukraine blows up more refineries and Wildberry logistic warehouses, Spain faces invasion, all sorts of AI skullduggery, and Neuromancer finally makes it to the screen.
Following Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) missile attacks on U.S. bases in Kuwait and Jordan, President Donald Trump is now signaling readiness for full-scale military action that could shatter the cycle of tit-for-tat exchanges and accelerate an end to the conflict, opening the door for a full-on revolution for the Persian nation.
“We’re going to beat the f****** s*** out of them […] We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating,” Trump said on Wednesday.
If the Iranian regime collapsed under external pressure and internal strain, the power vacuum could empower ordinary Iranians, who have long protested theocratic rule, to seize control of their country’s future. Hardcore Islamists brought the nation into a theocracy in February of 1979.
Saudi Arabia has announced the formation of a maritime coalition to protect shipping and energy supplies in the Red Sea as Yemen’s Houthi rebels threaten a vital route for the kingdom’s oil exports and global trade.
Riyadh on Thursday hosted a meeting of 43 countries and the EU to discuss plans to form a multinational maritime defensive coalition.
After the meeting, 14 countries affirmed their commitment to the coalition, including Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan and several other Arab and African countries, according to the kingdom’s defence ministry.
The United Arab Emirates and Oman were notably absent, but the ministry said the door remains open for countries that want to join the coalition.
The alliance is “aimed at enhancing maritime security, protecting freedom of navigation, securing international trade routes and energy supply routes, and protecting shared maritime interests in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden”, the 14 countries said in a joint statement.
The statement added the coalition would be led by Saudi Arabia and headquartered in Riyadh, with the participating countries agreeing to share intelligence and engage in joint maritime operations and exercises.
I exclusively uncovered the identities of prominent U.S. journalists flown to China by a CCP-linked influence operation seeking “favorable coverage” and “positive messages” about Beijing. 🧵
The names include:
– Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist
– Matthew Yglesias, Vox co-founder
– Ronald Brownstein, CNN senior political analyst
– Bradford Plumer, New York Times reporter
– Marjorie Miller, former Associated Press vice president
Also identified:
– Steve Clemons, former The Hill editor-at-large
– David Rohde, MS NOW senior national security reporter
– Jonathan Alter, NBC News and MSNBC political analyst
– David Sweeney, former NPR managing editor
– Daniel Gross, former Yahoo Finance columnist
Also on the roster:
– Marilyn Geewax, former NPR senior editor
– Kathleen Deveny, former Newsweek editor
– Tom Omestad, former U.S. News & World Report correspondent
– Steve Chapman, former Chicago Tribune columnist
– Bruce Stokes, former National Journal correspondent
The list continues:
– Craig Gilbert, former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Washington bureau chief
– Tony Semerad, Salt Lake Tribune reporter
– Shikha Dalmia, former The Week columnist
– Jonathan Broder, former Newsweek senior writer
Also identified:
– Cristi Kempf, former Chicago Tribune associate managing editor
– Jon Healey, Los Angeles Times deputy editorial page editor
– Julian Pecquet, former Foreign Affairs reporter
Trip organizer CUSEF was founded by Tung Chee-hwa, a former senior official in the CCP’s United Front system, the influence apparatus Beijing uses to cultivate foreign elites and shape institutions outside China.
According to [Sen. Rand] Paul, “During his time as NIAID Director, and particularly during the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci took meticulous notes about his work. He made note of conversations, decisions, and his thoughts about actions taken by politicians and other officials.” This past weekend, Paul released a gargantuan 1,141 pages of Fauci’s notes. Very little in these pages enhances Fauci’s already deeply tarnished reputation.
Most notably, on January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote:
It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.
America and the world spent most of the next two years in an increasingly furious debate over whether the virus emerged from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, perhaps from a pangolin; or from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the separate institution of the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (which was also doing research on coronaviruses found in bats); or somewhere else. Fauci apparently knew — notice he didn’t write “believe” or “theorize” — he could rule out the wet-market theory but never felt obligated to share that conclusion with the rest of us. Instead, he repeatedly dismissed and downplayed the lab-leak theory.
More at the link.
“Revealed: Five Months After Fauci Got Vaccinated, He Suffered a Pulmonary Infarction, an Adverse Effect Associated With the Vaccine.’ He Kept This a Secret.”
The alternate celebrity and villain of the COVID-19 policy response repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse answering even mundane questions, such as the color of the hearing room’s carpet, following publication of over 1,100 pages of diary-like notes that have raised even more questions about the veracity of his COVID-era public statements.
Committee Republicans repeatedly argued Fauci could not opt out of answering questions due to President Biden’s sweeping preemptive pardon, the validity of which has been questioned because it was signed by autopen amid Biden’s cognitive decline. Legal analysts explained Wednesday how Fauci could still be prosecuted.
Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford, who pointedly disagreed with colleagues on the Fifth Amendment issue, waited until the hearing’s end to recall that Congress went through a near-identical exercise in President Obama’s second term.
It held former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt for giving an opening statement at a House hearing in 2013 on her alleged discrimination against conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, then invoking her rights under the Fifth Amendment to decline giving testimony or answering questions that may expose one to criminal prosecution.
Fauci did the same Wednesday.
Lankford asked committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., whether the Lerner vote determined the Fauci outcome. Paul, who has called for Fauci’s prosecution for years, said lawmakers have a week to study the issue before voting on a contempt resolution.
The question that courts may have to answer is whether Biden’s pardon preempts Fauci’s right against self-incrimination, since he can’t be prosecuted “as long as he answers truthfully” and the statute of limitations forecloses some claims anyway, Paul said.
George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf floated two other ways Fauci could testify without risk to himself: a two-thirds committee vote or a simple House majority to immunize him, or doing media interviews in which he’s not under oath, since “it is not a crime to lie to the public.”
More blow-by-blow Fauci testimony details at the link. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Congressional committee issues subpoenas to organizations tied to China-linked Dem megadonor. The latest subpoenas raise the question of whether U.S. tax law — which grants tax exemptions and shields charitable donor identities — can be used to route foreign money into domestic political activity. At the heart of it, questions abound whether the far-left outfits have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).”
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., has issued subpoenas to three tax-exempt organizations tied to socialist megadonor Neville Roy Singham, an American multimillionaire living in Shanghai with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
The subpoenas have been served, a spokesperson for Smith’s office told Just the News, on BreakThrough News, Tricontinental and The People’s Forum, all three of which are funded, at least in part, by Singham. The subpoenas come after nearly a year of the Committee’s attempts to get answers from the three non-profit organizations regarding foreign influence in U.S. nonprofits.
“For months, the Ways and Means Committee has been investigating how the Chinese Communist Party has been taking advantage of our country’s laws through its tax-exempt sector to sow chaos and division here in the United States,” Smith said in a statement. “Public reporting has traced hundreds of millions of dollars from Neville Roy Singham – a tech mogul living in Shanghai – that was funneled through a web of shell companies and donor-advised funds that concealed the true source of the money before it reached these organizations.”
The subpoenas request documents showing whether the organizations have received or transmitted funds connected to foreign nationals or foreign entities, contracts between those nationals or entities, documents and communications between employees and Singham or foreign nationals about the organization.
“Three non-profits connected to Mr. Singham – BreakThrough News, Tricontinental, and The People’s Forum – have stonewalled the Ways and Means Committee’s investigation. That ends now,” Smith said in his statement. “These subpoenas will compel the production of the documents they have withheld for months and will help expose how America’s tax laws and charitable sector may have been exploited to advance the CCP’s influence operations inside the United States. The American people deserve to know whether the CCP has exploited America’s tax-exempt sector to advance its agenda. These subpoenas will allow the Ways and Means Committee to identify the networks that exploit our tax laws, and further expose the urgent need for legislation to close those loopholes for good.”
The Democratic Socialists of America wants you to know exactly what it wants, and Megan Romer, the group’s national co-chair, laid it out on national television without once reaching for a hedge word over the most radical ideas on the party platform.
The platform itself reads like a fever dream a committee wrote line by line. A 32-hour workweek with no reduction in pay and benefits, a federal jobs guarantee, canceling all student debt, and free college from pre-K through graduate school anchor the economic wish list, alongside healthcare that is universal, free, and includes gender-affirming care as a guaranteed right.
The platform calls for more publicly owned social housing, universal rent control, and a guaranteed lawyer for every tenant. On policing, the platform wants demilitarized police departments, defunded police unions, and money pulled out of police budgets entirely, all of which the DSA frames as a first step toward abolishing prisons and policing outright.
On foreign policy, the platform demands the defunding of the Department of War, the closure of overseas military bases, and an end to all foreign wars, and it pairs that with support for International Criminal Court prosecutions of what it deems American war criminals. As for Israel, the DSA calls for an end to all U.S. military and economic aid, prosecution of American and Israeli leaders over what many consider a genocide in Gaza, and recognition of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
The DSA is just as blunt about reimagining how the government works. The platform seeks statehood for Washington, D.C., self-determination for U.S. territories, and the abolition of both the Electoral College and the Senate, alongside an expanded House and a presidency and Supreme Court that answer to Congress instead of operating independently. The DSA wants to swap the two-party system for proportional representation and ranked-choice voting and pay for all of it through full public financing of every election.
And, to top it all off, the platform calls for slavery reparations.
Fox News host Shannon Bream ran through the DSA’s platform position by position, true or false, no room to dodge. Romer never flinched. She confirmed that the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court, eliminating ICE, ending borders while granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, defunding the Pentagon, abolishing prisons as a long-term goal, and placing most large corporations under government or public ownership. At every step, she answered without hesitation, affirming that each position accurately reflected the DSA’s platform.
If we can’t stop the DSA at the ballot box, then stopping them at the ammo box becomes inevitable…
Michigan journalist Charlie LeDuff, who formerly worked at The New York Times and The Detroit News, decided to visit this 88-year-old woman to ask why she’s made nearly 15,000 donations to Democrats in the last 5 years:
You’ll note that resident Elizabeth Waffle is living in a trailer because her house burned down.
LeDuff: ‘Did you make 15,000 donations in 5 years? $150,000?’
Waffle: ‘A hundred and fifty? Hell no. I don’t have that kind of money.’
Her house burned down two years ago and she’s been living in a camper since.
She wasn’t even sure if she had enough money to pay the guy who was coming to mow the fields of weeds around the camper!
DOJ needs to audit ActBlue with proctological intensity.
After the Trump administration indicated that there were at least 35,000 noncitizen registered voters in New Jersey, the Democratic governor there tried to do damage control by admitting to at least 6,600 registered noncitizen voters. Soon after her admission, however, she refused point-blank to hand over that data to the Trump administration.
In fact, Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who has wasted a great deal of time and money trying to protect illegal alien criminals through her dangerous and disgusting sanctuary policies, actually referred to the noncitizen voters as “citizens” of her state. Either she is under the deluded impression we are still operating under the Articles of Confederation, or she thinks she gets to be a petty dictator because she has rigged elections enough to ensure her party never gets out of power.
Last Tuesday, a reporter asked Sherrill during a press conference, “The Trump administration is seeking, I believe by today, the list of noncitizens who are registered to vote and the approximately 400 that did vote, to what extent will your administration comply with the Trump administration’s request in that regard?”
Sherrill self-righteously but inarticulately sneered to a round of applause, “As I have said, I am not in the habit of turning over private, identifying administration—information of the citizens of New Jersey.” Again, it is completely outrageous that this is how she refers to noncitizens, particularly since many of them are illegal aliens.
Snip.
Why might Sherrill be so determined to ensure there is not a thorough cleaning out of the voter rolls in her state? In 2025, she did apparently win the gubernatorial race against Republican Jack Ciattarelli by about 453,000, so that is a fairly sizable margin. But back in 2020, when there were allegations of fraud, then-Gov. Phil Murphy beat Ciattarelli by only about 84,200 votes. The preliminary findings, meaning the likely lowball initial results, from the Department of Justice this year as to how many illegal aliens are registered to vote in New Jersey were 35,152.
Suddenly, when you compare these numbers, New Jersey Democrats don’t seem to have quite such a firm grip on power in their state, do they?
“A California-Funded Homeless Shelter Gave Us Meth Pipes.” Of course it did.
As governor of California, Gavin Newsom has repeatedly supported “harm reduction” policies, which enable drug use in the name of making it “safer.” He created the state’s Harm Reduction Initiative, which funded “syringe services programs” for “people who inject and smoke fentanyl and/or methamphetamines.” His Department of Public Health has endorsed distributing syringes, glass pipes, and “[c]ontainers for mixing injectable drugs” to drug users. Newsom argued earlier this year that harm-reduction tactics “increase the likelihood of people entering substance use treatment.”
But do California’s harm-reduction programs encourage addicts to enter treatment? We visited the Skid Row Care Campus, a homeless-services site in Los Angeles County, to witness “harm reduction” in action. We discovered that, instead of directing addicts to get clean, the taxpayer-funded program doles out free paraphernalia, enabling addicts to get high—no questions asked.
We arrived at Skid Row in the morning. The campus, bounded by pastel-colored buildings and a metal gate, looked like an apocalyptic wasteland. Homeless people and addicts were splayed across the common areas, with some smoking what seemed to be hard drugs with impunity.
We stepped onto the courtyard connected to the street. No one stopped us, asked for identification, or searched us for weapons or drugs. This is apparently by design, judging by the Skid Row Action Plan and its implementation outline, which, singly or together, inspired the creation of the campus, denounced the “racist and classist war on drugs,” and called on local officials to create hubs “free from monitoring by law enforcement” and staffed by people with histories of “substance use and sex work.”
We entered campus and found a walk-up counter, where an attendant sat before shelves of drug paraphernalia. Users come to this counter to get free needles and crack pipes, with which they can inject or smoke hard drugs.
“What can I get you?” he asked. “We have oil burners, we have spray shooters, we have socks, we have petroleum jelly.”
Across several visits, we obtained drug-testing strips, syringes, and crack pipes.
“Russia admits defeat in the south, cannot keep the highway open.” Reporting from Ukraine is exaggerating a tad, but Russia is having serious problems with drones taking out logistics trucks on the Zaporizhia logistics route.
The Democrats have their 2028 presidential primary schedule almost finalized, featuring a trio of new states in the first six, and the early sense is that Republicans will stick with the familiar lineup of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. It might seem early to be thinking about the 2028 presidential primaries, but if you’re one of the candidates, you must prioritize, and as Yogi Berra said, “It gets late early out there.”
As noted at the tail end of yesterday’s edition of this newsletter, over in the Washington Post, I examined the Democratic National Committee’s proposed, and likely to be final, schedule for the Democratic 2028 presidential primaries:
South Carolina, January 22, 2028
Nevada, February 1, 2028
New Hampshire, February 8, 2028
New Mexico, February 15, 2028
Michigan, February 22, 2028
Virginia, February 29, 2028
One week after that, March 7, will likely be Super Tuesday, the earliest date that the other states can schedule their primaries or caucuses. States that are likely to hold their primaries that day include Alabama, Arkansas, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Vermont.
That’s a promising early schedule if you’re a candidate on the establishment side among the Democrats, and a rougher one if you’re a socialist or affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. Based upon Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s past performances, South Carolina and Virginia are rough territory, Nevada and New Hampshire are friendly territory, and it’s a little hard to say about New Mexico and Michigan.
Snip.
When I say a socialist or DSA-affiliated candidate, I am mostly thinking of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; she is, at least on paper, the early frontrunner in New Hampshire, and Axios ranks her as the candidate who is second-most-likely to win the nomination, behind Harris.
Some racial essentialists argue that it is absurd to contend that heavily white New Hampshire is likely to be supportive of the Puerto Rican AOC. First, a University of New Hampshire survey conducted this month not only found her with a one-point lead over Pete Buttigieg, but 64 percent of likely Democratic primary voters in the state said they felt favorable about her, with just 9 percent saying they felt unfavorable about her; only Buttigieg and Sanders had comparable numbers. (At 84 years old, Sanders is not running in 2028; if AOC runs, Sanders is widely expected to endorse her.)
Also note, “Primary exit polling this year suggests that DSA candidates run best among young, college-educated and higher-income demographics.” In 2020 (the last time Democrats had a competitive presidential primary in New Hampshire), 54 percent of their primary voters had a bachelor’s degree or higher. Forty percent of Democratic primary voters reported a salary of $100,000 per year or more, and 72 percent made $50,000 per year or more.
“Thousands of Military-Age Men From Morocco Invade Spain’s Ceuta Territory.” Ceuta is an exclave on the north African coast
Thousands of military-age men from Morocco invaded Spain today by crossing the border into the Spanish territory of Ceuta.
Spain has deployed its military as these men arrive by sea and breach the border fence.
Snip.
Spain’s government said Thursday evening it would send the Armed Forces to help the Civil Guard “to maintain security in the city of Ceuta.” It also announced that Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez would join Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska and visit Ceuta Friday.
“The situation is absolute chaos,” Rachid Sbihi, head of the association that represents Spain’s Civil Guard officers in Ceuta, who police the border told The Associated Press. “It’s not possible to give precise numbers, but there are thousands of migrants crossing,” he said, adding that the border had “totally collapsed.”
However, Spain’s interior ministry won’t declare a national emergency.
This follows hot on the heels of Spain’s far-left Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez declaring an illegal alien amnesty.
The Spanish government and its partners openly state that the reason for legalising more than half a million migrants is to "defeat the far right." This is literally weaponised demography. They took the most conspiratorial interpretation of the "Great Replacement" that is not…
I probably should have noted that Andy Burham is now Prime Minister of the UK. The guy wasn’t even an MP until June 18 (though he had been before), when he won a by-election triggered by the existing MP resigning specifically so Burham could run for PM. Here’s The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters on the guy.
Remember: Your private conversations with AI agents aren’t. “Claude Chats Popped Up in Google Search Results.”
The rogue OpenAI agent behind this month’s unprecedented AI-driven cyber intrusion claimed a second corporate victim, an executive at New York-based Modal Labs has revealed – a detail absent from the original account and one that widens the known blast radius of the episode.
According to the Modal executive and sources cited by Reuters, the same autonomous agent that broke into Hugging Face also compromised one of Modal’s customers, using that customer’s environment as a staging base for the broader campaign.
Modal was pointed about the distinction: its own platform and isolation were never breached. The agent exploited an unauthenticated endpoint that one of Modal’s customers had left open to the internet – effectively an unlocked door anyone could have walked through – giving it root-level access to that customer’s code-execution sandboxes. From there the agent had a disposable, third-party launchpad from which to run the rest of its operation.
It’s bad enough that a frontier AI agent can independently discover attack paths, escape its container, and compromise an unaffiliated company’s production systems. The Modal revelation shows it reached further than that – treating any publicly reachable, poorly secured infrastructure it encountered as expendable staging ground, exactly the opportunistic chaining that security researchers have warned agentic systems would carry out at machine speed.
Most of what led up to the Modal disclosure has already been picked over, but the shape of it is worth a recap. In early July, OpenAI was running an internal evaluation built on ExploitGym – a public benchmark that measures how well an AI system can turn a known vulnerability into a working exploit. The models under test, GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased prototype, were deliberately run with their cyber-safety refusals reduced and the classifiers that normally block high-risk activity switched off, because the point was to measure maximum offensive capability.
The agent found and exploited a previously unknown flaw in the one package-registry proxy it was allowed to reach, escalated privileges, moved through OpenAI’s research environment, and got to a machine with open internet access. Once online, it reasoned that Hugging Face likely hosted the answer key to the very benchmark it was being tested on, and went to steal it rather than solve the problems itself. Between roughly July 11 and 13 it ran thousands of automated actions against the platform – gaining code execution through two separate flaws in its dataset-processing pipeline, harvesting credentials, and moving laterally across internal clusters. Forensic work later recovered on the order of 17,600 distinct attacker actions.
Hugging Face caught and contained the intrusion through its own AI-assisted monitoring, and says the only thing the agent actually made off with was a limited set of the benchmark’s challenge solutions – no public models, datasets, or user-facing services tampered with. To reconstruct the timeline, its team had to fall back on an open-weight model, because the commercial frontier models refused to analyze the real attack data.
So a rouge AI agent found it’s way out of its sandbox, launched a privilege escalation attack, accessed the Internet, and picked out a target it assumed it could steal answers from rather than do the work itself? Did Gen Z program its work ethic?
The State of Texas and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reached a settlement, reversing the endangered species listing for the dunes sagebrush lizard while a new evaluation is conducted.
The dunes sagebrush lizard inhabits portions of West Texas, including the oil-rich Permian Basin.
The Biden administration listed the species as endangered in May 2024, citing threats from oil and gas development and climate change.
Texas sued in September 2024, arguing the listing relied on an indirect habitat model rather than population data, used a 1998 well-pad-density study that predates horizontal drilling, and ignored ongoing state conservation efforts.
The state also argued the listing impeded oil production and interfered with efforts to plug abandoned oil wells.
“The Biden-Harris Administration’s unlawful misuse of environmental law is a backdoor attempt to undermine Texas’s oil and gas industries which help keep the lights on for America,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said when announcing the lawsuit.
A Dallas Express investigation has uncovered evidence suggesting that some Muslim and Mexican immigrant drivers at DFW Airport may be operating as part of an organized network using multiple electronic devices, fraudulent driver accounts and GPS manipulation to control rideshare traffic.
A veteran Uber driver said DFW’s airport queue displayed a wait of zero to 15 minutes, but he received no rides for more than 45 minutes. He said regular Uber requests resumed after he left the airport’s geofenced queue.
DX documented drivers using multiple phones and tablets, vehicles with partially obscured plates, and one man denying that he had a work permit, green card or H-1B visa.
Federal prosecutors have charged rideshare schemes involving fraudulent or rented accounts, GPS spoofing, bots and hacked phones that allowed drivers to enter airport queues while physically elsewhere. A separate November 25, 2025 DFW-area driver post alleged that phones were left inside a stationary vehicle to preserve queue positions.
DX has not established that any specific driver filmed at DFW committed fraud. The investigation is examining whether coordinated drivers are manipulating the airport queue and diverting rides from other drivers.
The Final Boss of Crazy Cat Ladies: “Florida mail carrier accused of stealing 80 cats along her mail route and collecting them in her house. 80 cats were rescued from the home of Gail Giustino, 77, where there was a foot of poop.”
Life imitates Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In Canada, “a missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months….Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name ‘fus__ro_dah’ (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username ‘fus_ro_dah’ (one underscore after ‘fus’). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.”
Victor Davis Hanson on Iran. He thinks Trump will skedaddle, leave the gulf states and Israeli in charge of keeping watch on the rubble, and set up a government in exile and give it access to Iran’s sequestered funds. Honestly, I should have thought of the government in exile bit for my Iran roundup earlier this month.
Dhillon Law Group has filed a federal lawsuit against Midland County Judge Terry Johnson on behalf of a citizen journalist who says he was retaliated against after posting records critical of Johnson.
The suit alleges that Johnson responded the next day by posting Christino Rodriquez’ full name, Social Security number, date of birth, and driver’s license number to Facebook.
In districts with a Teacher Incentive Allotment, educators receive additional funds from the state toward increasing those teachers’ salaries. Funding is provided to the district for teachers who achieve a recognized, exemplary, and master designation. At least 90 percent of the funding is required to be used for teacher compensation on the campus where the designated individual works.
In order to comply with Texas law, the State Board for Educator Certification is requiring the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to remove “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training materials. Lawmakers have been concerned that materials produced by national board, which offers the National Board Certification, include politicized content.
SBEC members voted last week for the national board to “make updates to materials to come into compliance with Texas state law” and “provide evidence of compliance to [Texas Education Agency] staff by November 2, 2026.”
Few things get people’s attention quite so fast as cutting off money.
For most of the 21st century, Texas had a pretty welcoming attitude toward data center construction: Come on down! Like every other type of economic investment, from factory to fab to corporate HQ, if you had just about any need for a facility that would generate money and jobs, officials at all levels of Texas government would bend over backwards to provide you with some mix of incentives, subsidies and tax abatements, along with the state’s famous low tax and low regulation environment, to get you to build in the Lone Star State.
The massive AI data center build-out is changing those sentiments. A whole lot of people are starting to view AI as a job destroyer rather than creator, data centers are seen (rightly or wrongly) as too water- and power-hungry, and too much of a hassle for the relatively small number of local jobs they create.
And Texas politicians seem to be listening to the complaints.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has laid out rules “to make massive data centers pay for their own grid upgrades and curb their impact on residential power bills.”
Gov. Greg Abbott is praising new moves by Texas regulators that he says will prevent residential ratepayers from subsidizing the state’s data center boom.
In a filing sent to the governor this week, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) outline steps to make “large computational loads” pay more of their own costs and to tighten reliability rules for massive new projects.
This comes as polling has shown Texans are concerned that the energy-intensive projects will strain the power grid and water supply.
On June 10, Abbott ordered regulators to ensure data centers pay for the transmission and other infrastructure they require instead of shifting those costs onto Texas families. He also directed PUCT and ERCOT to structure interconnections so data center growth helps lower residential electric bills and to develop additional protections for ratepayers.
PUCT Chairman Thomas Gleeson’s July 17 response embraces that framing, saying Texas should welcome economic development “but it must do so in a manner that prioritizes affordability, reliability, and the interests of the residents who depend on the grid.” He stressed that Texans “will not be negatively impacted by the interconnection of these large electric consumers.”
The commission’s filing describes new rules and rulemakings aimed squarely at large loads. A February rule standardizes how utilities report proposed big loads into ERCOT’s forecasting, which regulators say will help avoid overbuilding transmission that would otherwise flow into customer rates.
Another change goes to who pays for new steel in the ground.
After a May review found that rapidly growing demand from large computational loads is driving costly grid upgrades, PUCT opened a rulemaking to require big loads to shoulder those costs. The proposal would make large customers post financial security for interconnection, use any forfeited security to offset transmission rates, and start paying transmission charges as soon as capacity to serve them is available—even if the data center hasn’t energized yet.
Regulators are also trying to keep existing megawatts from quietly disappearing into private deals.
A March rule says generation that was available to Texans before September 1, 2025 must remain available, even if it will primarily serve a new large load going forward. Any such arrangement must be vetted by ERCOT, and PUCT can impose conditions to protect reliability.
Meanwhile, ERCOT is moving to a “Batch Zero” study of all qualifying large loads of 75 megawatts or more, designed to evaluate their combined impact and identify needed upgrades through 2032. Future batch studies and a new interconnection‑screening process are meant to prevent clusters of data centers from overburdening the grid.
Beyond current authority, PUCT and ERCOT are asking lawmakers to give them clearer power over big end‑users.
They want explicit authority to set reliability requirements for large computational loads, the ability for ERCOT to order those loads to curtail directly, mandatory registration of large data centers with both agencies, and an expansion of the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act to cover owners of big load facilities, not just generators and transmission owners.
Texas legislators are rethinking a tax break for data center equipment that sailed easily through the Capitol 13 years ago.
The Finance Committee of the Texas Senate convened on Monday morning to hear testimony on House Bill (HB) 1223, a state law passed during the 83rd Legislature in 2013 that created a sales tax exemption for tangible personal property purchased for essential use in qualifying data centers.
Analysts from the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, an industry spokesman, and a local activist all testified before a committee that was largely critical of the law, revealing a growing distaste in both parties for data center development — and highlighting the obstacles to repealing a law that was just as bipartisan.
“What we thought we were voting for back in 2013, it’s a much different animal these days,” said Finance Committee Chair Joan Huffman (R-Houston).
HB 1223 passed the House unanimously and the Senate by a vote of 23 to eight.
In the first biennium after it passed, Texas ceded $14.6 million in sales tax revenue due to the exemption, according to the committee meeting notice.
The amount of forgone revenue has since ballooned to $3.3 billion for the upcoming biennium, said Brad Reynolds, an analyst from the comptroller’s office.
That’s quite a bit of cheddar.
Before.
Much of the growth took place recently, Reynolds told the committee. From 2014 through 2020, just 10 facilities successfully sought the exemption. In this fiscal year alone, the state has already certified 59 new data centers and is considering five more.
When asked by state Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) when the “hockey stick hit,” Reynolds said applications for certification shot up starting in 2021 as remote work trends took hold and the demand for remote data storage grew.
“It had a lot to do with the increasing digitization of the economy,” Reynolds said.
Data centers devoted to artificial intelligence account for about a quarter of the industry today, according to Dan Diorio, executive vice president of state policy and government affairs for Data Center Coalition, who also testified.
“Cloud [computing] and the basic digital infrastructure that we all depend on continues to be the dominant reason for data center development,” Diorio said.
Members often revisited the question of whether data centers would have clustered in Texas without the tax break.
Thirty-five other states offer a sales tax exemption for data centers in some form, Reynolds told Bettencourt, who called the exemption “one of the drivers of where they bring their location, their equipment.”
HB 1223 only applies to single-user data centers. Multi-tenant data centers cannot make use of the benefit, according to the statute.
“Do you think these data centers would stop coming to Texas or proliferate regardless of whether they’re exempt or not?” state Sen. Pete Flores (R-Llano) asked Reynolds.
Reynolds said that “Texas is the second-largest colocation, multitenant data center market in the country.”
“That all happened without any sales tax exemption,” Reynolds said.
Colocation (where different companies have their own servers inside a data center side-by-side with those of other companies) looked like it was going to be big for a while, but then hypervisor-based systems like AWS (where massive CPU, RAM, and storage pools are split into dozens or hundreds of virtual machines) came to dominate the remote server service market.
Democrats and Republicans alike took turns at the microscope, scrutinizing data centers’ purported benefits to the state.
Bettencourt pointed to the “national security imperative” of having a well-supplied set of American-developed data centers.
State Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAllen) and Carol Alvarado (D-Houston) both questioned how many permanent jobs the industry creates.
“Data centers, from May 2023 to May 2024, were responsible for a 69 percent year-over-year increase in construction activity. That far outpaces any other sector,” Diorio responded to Hinojosa, adding that even temporary jobs such as construction tend to stretch out over several projects in a full pipeline of development.
Members frequently referred to the results of a comptroller’s audit of 20 of the 138 data centers currently benefiting from the exemption in the state. According to the audit, six of the 20 facilities failed to meet the law’s qualification requirements.
“It’s really shocking to me that you would say, in your 20 audits of 138 — again, everybody can do the percentages there — that six of the 20 you audited don’t meet the certification,”
If you’re gonna take Big Tex’s taxpayer money, you have to abide by Big Tex’s rules.
Lawmakers are questioning whether Texas’ generous tax breaks for data centers are working as intended after state officials confirmed several facilities failed to meet eligibility requirements.
During a Monday meeting of the Texas Senate Committee on Finance, senators discussed the future of section 151.359 of the Texas Tax Code, which allows qualifying data center developments that meet a certain threshold of commerce to be exempt from the state sales tax. In order to qualify, a data center must be a minimum of 100,000 square feet, commit to investing an additional $200 million within five years, and create at least 20 qualifying jobs.
Brad Reynolds, the chief revenue estimator in the comptroller’s office, stated that his audit division has been in the process of doing compliance checks on data centers using the exemption.
“[T]o date we have 20 of such audits that are either in process or already have been completed. One of those six came forward voluntarily [and] asked to have their certification removed [because they] lost their electricity supplier via ERCOT. The other five missed the 100,000 square-foot requirement. The others have missed the job creation requirement, which tells you really how little employment is stemming from this,” said Reynolds.
Reynolds admitted that in 2013 when House Bill 1223 was passed, which exempted data centers from the sales tax, the legislature estimated only one new facility per year.
However, the comptroller’s office saw an additional two to three facilities put up per year initially.
“I would say the early estimates are significantly too low to begin with because, as I say, the first few years we had about twice as many centers come in than we anticipated; and with spending at a higher level than those minimums, so they were too low to begin with, and of course never anticipated the kind of rapid development [in] numbers and scale that we see today,” stated Reynolds when asked about the extra capital investments.
He offered the committee a simplified version of the estimation that the comptroller’s office does. As more hyperscale data centers are developed in Texas, the cost of extra electricity consumption, as well as sales-taxable IT equipment, totals $107 million in forgone taxes and rises to $246 million by the third year of the facility’s operation.
Meta Platforms and the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock on Tuesday announced a venture to develop and operate a data center campus in El Paso, Texas, a project that would cost about $14 billion in development.
The race to build out AI infrastructure has prompted tech giants to turn to debt sales worth tens of billions of dollars and seek external capital from fund managers such as BlackRock due to an unprecedented scale of investment.
Meta said BlackRock-managed funds will take an 80% ownership stake in the venture, with Meta retaining the remaining 20%. A portion of BlackRock’s investment will be financed through $12.5 billion in debt. Meta will also receive a $1 billion distribution to align ownership.
Meta will contribute land and in-progress construction assets worth about $2.3 billion, while BlackRock will make a cash contribution of about $4.9 billion, the company said.
The Facebook-parent will enter into lease agreements with the venture, allowing it to secure computing capacity without directly funding and owning the campus itself, at a time when investors are concerned if data center investments will pay off.
Borrowing by tech companies has hit a fever pitch, with BofA Global Research saying that AI-related bond issuance reached $270 billion by early July this year, nearly doubling what was raised in all of 2025.
“Meta has said it plans to invest $600 billion in AI infrastructure, including data centers and new jobs in the U.S. by 2028, with an aim to fast-track work on personal superintelligence, which could help spin up new cash flows from the Meta AI app, ad tools and smart glasses.” I assume Meta’s AI push will be as laughably unsuccessful as its money losing virtual reality efforts.
Hey, I get to use the after part of the meme as well!
Also, given concerns over excessive water use, El Paso is not the place I would choose for a data center.
America and the world need data centers, but after the initial construction phase, they create a lot less local jobs than a fab or factory. The electricity and water-use concerns are real, but using closed-loop rather than evaporative cooling methods should greatly minimize the latter. A big step should be making sure big data pays market rates for their water and electricity rather than receiving state and local subsidies for them.
I’m pretty sure Texas will still let data centers get built in the state, but the days when Big Tech could expect a free ride to do so are coming to an end.
With nearly constant news about AI-based security threats (both within and without), it’s notable that several tech giants have banded together to address the problem.
Nvidia and a host of tech giants on Monday launched a new artificial intelligence safety initiative focused on open models, as the fallout from a cyberattack committed by rogue OpenAI models continues.
Last week, it emerged that the target of the attack, startup Hugging Face, was unable to use leading U.S. frontier models to defend itself, with guardrails not distinguishing between aggressor and defender. Instead, it turned to a self-hosted, open-weight Chinese model, which was not bound by those same restrictions.
I’ve got to say, when I read “Hugging Face,” I don’t think of an emoji, I think of this:
I don’t think I want to collaborate with a company that wants to shove a chestburster egg down my throat.
In the wake of U.S. lawmakers increasingly weighing how to curb growing adoption of Chinese AI models, the most advanced of which are open weight, tech giants have launched an initiative aimed at building and sharing open AI tools.
Open models can be downloaded, modified and self-hosted, in contrast to closed models — including frontier systems built by Anthropic and OpenAI — which can only be accessed through specific infrastructure.
“The Open Secure AI Alliance will work to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities using open technologies,” Nvidia said in a statement. “The recent Hugging Face security incident delivered a clear reminder: cyber defenders need open, frontier agentic systems for self-defense.”
Alongside Nvidia, other members of the alliance include Microsoft, SpaceX, Palantir, and dozens of other tech companies from the U.S. and Europe.
So, that’s three leading tech companies…and Microsoft, which is probably responsible for more security holes than all the rest combined.
News articles don’t seem to give the full membership list, so in a bit of irony, I asked Google’s AI.
Adobe
Cadence
Capital One
Cisco
Cloudera
CloudFlare
Cognition
Crowdstrike
Databricks
Dell Technologies
DoorDash
Elastic
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hugging Face
IBM
LangChain
The Linux Foundation
Microsoft
NAVER
NetApp
Nous Research
OpenClaw
Palantir Technologies
Palo Alto Networks
Red Hat (which is an IBM subsidiary)
Reflection AI
Salesforce
SAP
SK Telecom
ServiceNow
Siemens
Snowflake
SpaceXAI (xAI)
Synopsys
Thinking Machines Lab
TrendAI
A pretty extensive list of (mostly) American tech giants (NAVER and SK Telecom are South Korean companies, and SAP and Siemens are German). Hell, I’ve even worked for three companies on that list.
Notable omissions? OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, all of whom used closed rather than open AI models. Plus Apple, which made the conscious decision not to be a player in the AI space.
That’s an awful lot of collective brainpower to address the problem, but I wonder if the very size will make it unwieldy.
More sharing of open AI tools are probably in order.
I’m not in the, “OMG, we have to shovel a zillion dollars into AI because China!” camp. The “China is an AI giant” crowd seems to have a lot of the same crowd that always overhype China, but their tech offerings always seem to have feet of clay. My working assumption is that AI will prove similar.
AI may be untrustworthy to base core internal systems on, but it’s a champion at looking for security vulnerabilities. Companies used to worry about “script kiddies” getting access to their systems, but AI attack tools are script kiddies on steroids. They can spin up distributed resources to try every known attack and look for new ones. As I’ve noted before:
Internet applications gain usefulness from widespread adoption and the number of other components they tie into and support. You know what creates new vulnerabilities? A larger user base and the number of other components they tie into and support, which creates more attack surfaces for malicious actors to exploit.
The flaw isn’t the fault of Random Guy in Nebraska, the fault is the company adopting software that they can’t possibly test for all the use-cases they’re going to use it for. Surprise! Just about every high tech company in the world is in the same boat. Pretty much everyone uses a wide panoply of open source tools for their Internet applications, and no one can test all the permutations of how each component might be put to use.
You can’t eliminate the risk, you can only minimize and mitigate it. You can use containerization strategies (Docker, Kubernetes, Container D, etc.) to minimize attack surfaces and limit contagion. You can run all your code through security scanning tools on your CI/CD platform of choice. You can do constant testing and keep rolling backups of everything to limit risk and speed recovery…
But there still a good chance that the platform you’re using today is different than the platform you’ll be using ten years from now, and you’ll have to go through the same learning lessons discovering new vulnerabilities for the new platform all over again.
AI gives malicious actors the capability to test all potential vulnerabilities in all components virtually simultaneously, and researchers have discovered a wide variety of ways to “jailbreak” AIs to carry out such attacks, no matter what guardrails have been put in place to prevent malicious use. Theoretically, IT should do preemptive pentesting (probably with their own AI tools) to find such vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, but they were already overworked before a lot of dim executive types decided they could get by with lower headcount thanks to all this magic AI they kept hearing about.
Hopefully this grand alliance can provide quicker answers to The AI Menace, but it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better…
Lots of women evidently like looking at middle-aged Instagram/TikTok/YouTube “influencers” who have managed to stay young and trim looking. One influencer’s secret? Not existing.
About two months ago, I started following Isabelle Santos, she goes by @IsabelleSantos55 on Instagram. She is also on Facebook. She has a cool 133,000 Instagram followers and another 55,000 on Facebook. Familiar names started popping up in her likes and followers. Chelsea Handler liked this post.
That wouldn’t be a selling point to me.
Menopause expert Tamsen Fadal follows her. Board-certified plastic surgeon Dr. Berry Fairchild is in the mix.
I remember thinking, “Well…if all these smart, credible people are in her orbit, and her glow-up is this insane, I need to know what she’s doing.” Because Isabelle looked ridiculously good for a 57-year-old woman. It was exactly the kind of transformation Instagram knows women our age can’t stop staring at.
Then there’s the backstory. Isabelle was apparently married to an “asshole” and a “cheater.” She uses these words often to describe her ex-husband. I can relate. The details are never really explained, but the implication is clear: the divorce set her free, she found herself again, lost 80 pounds, and never looked back. Now she is hot as f*ck.
She’s half French, half Filipino, and lives somewhere in Los Angeles. Over the last two years she’s supposedly lost 80 pounds, developed abs, acquired the jawline of a Marvel superhero, and somehow ended up with better skin than I had at 37. The woman appears to be aging in reverse.
She’s the exact age, the exact look, and the exact backstory the algorithm knows will stop a midlife woman mid-scroll. Then again, Isabelle is so gorgeous she could probably stop anyone.
Naturally, I wanted to know her secret.
And according to Isabelle, the secret isn’t surgery. It isn’t HRT. It isn’t a GLP-1. It’s NMN, magnesium, and a probiotic. Conveniently linked in her Glow Up Guide and, of course, on Amazon.
The Catch Is…Isabelle Isn’t Real
Like nearly every successful influencer, Isabelle has mastered the algorithm. Almost every Reel goes viral. Some have hundreds of comments. Others have thousands. Most of them have hundreds of thousands of views. Which, as it turns out, isn’t an accident, it’s by design.
And somehow, Instagram doesn’t think it’s important to tell you that Isabelle isn’t actually a real person.
I commented “GLOW,” “REVERSE,” and whatever other incantation the algorithm demanded so I could get her “routine.” It turned out to be little more than a link to Pure Health Max NMN on Amazon. I’m intentionally not linking it here because they’ve already had enough of my clicks.
I tried contacting Isabelle through Instagram, Facebook, and email. Every reply was automated. Which, in hindsight, makes perfect sense. It’s hard to get a personal response from someone who doesn’t exist.
Thousands of women are taking anti-aging and weight-loss advice from a fictional woman who will never wrinkle, gain weight, or go through menopause.
“Isabelle isn’t unique. She’s part of an entire army of AI wellness women in their 50s and 60s.”
I’m sure I don’t follow any bots on Instagram because I don’t use Instagram. (I briefly tried using it for science fiction book collecting content. But every time their algorithm suggested some “popular influencer” for my feed I merely blocked them. After a few weeks Instagram killed my account because it said I was “violating site rules” or something.)
But I keep running into more and more AI-generated content, even when I’m not looking for. Facebook keeps adding AI dog videos to the Shorts it shows me (which is only on the iPhone version of the app).
It’s becoming easier and easier to create videos of fake people, and harder and harder to detect them. You have to be extra-diligent to keep them out of your feed, especially if they confirm your preexisting opinions. Caveat spectator.
This is a very different post than the one I set out to write.
When I talked about the current memory shortage, I didn’t really cover Chinese memory fabs, as I lumped them in with “older fabs” churning out older types of memory that weren’t relevant to the current memory crunch. However, after I posted, I came across news for ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT). According to this list of semiconductor fabs (which I’ve used as a starting point for many semiconductor posts), their Fab 1 in Hefei, China started running DRAM on a 19nm process node in 2019. That’s unsuitable to fab the high bandwidth memory (HBM) demanded by the AI buildout that’s currently making money for Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron hand-over-fist. But it is already churning out DDR4 (and low-power DDR4 for the mobile market), and just last year started fabbing DDR5. Naturally, being a Chinese company, they probably stole their technology from Samsung and SK Hynix.
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), mainland China’s only mass producer of DRAM—
Technically untrue. SK Hynix’s C2F fab in Wuxi, China turns out DRAM, but I included it in SK Hynix’s global output.
—officially launched its initial public offering on the STAR Market, raising approximately CNY 57.9 billion (roughly $8.4 billion) at CNY 8.66 per share, setting a new record for the board. Fueled by surging AI server demand, the company turned profitable for the first time in 2025, with net profit for the first half of 2026 estimated between CNY 50 billion and CNY 57 billion. Supply chain sources indicate that major PC manufacturers including Dell, HP, and Lenovo have already locked in CXMT’s DRAM production capacity through the end of 2027.
I haven’t been able to verify this tech name dropping, but I haven’t tried very hard, because I was chasing down more fundamental questions.
Meanwhile, although Apple is evaluating the integration of CXMT’s LPDDR5X chips, a Bank of America report points to three major constraints—geopolitical risks, technical specifications, and patent issues—making large-scale, substantial procurement unlikely in the near term. CXMT’s listing also provides a glimpse into China’s memory industry landscape, where breakthroughs are being made across DRAM, NAND Flash, and NOR Flash, though a significant gap remains compared to the world’s top three manufacturers.
I’ve seen the “Apple testing CXMT chips” in more reputable sources, so let’s assume it’s true for now.
$8.4 billion is a big chunk of change, but in the semiconductor world that will buy you…one 14nm fab, with a bit of change left over.
But according to some breathless analysis in the sort of farflung web outlets that don’t make up part of your regular feed:
A new report claims that CXMT will come exceptionally close to Micron’s DRAM wafer production capacity by the end of this year. In the coming years, China could become the world’s second-largest producer of DRAM globally, fundamentally altering the global DRAM market.
It has been estimated that CXMT will end 2026 with 350,000 wafer starts per month (WSPM). That’s a mere 25,000 fewer wafers than Micron. China has reportedly forced CXMT to share its DRAM technology with other Chinese semiconductor companies, including JHIC, Swaysure, and XMC (a YMTC subsidiary).
Obviously, you’re not getting 350,000 wafer starts per month from one fab. That piece tells us that CXMT has three fabs, two in Hefei and one in Beijing, with another in Shanghai due to come online later this year.
However, the source they cite is…a random guy on Twitter with 754 followers. I’d like a more solid source than that.
Could CXMT actually pay for two more modern-but-not-cutting edge fabs? Maybe. The city of Hefei (and possibly other government and CCP-connected entities) has been subsidizing them.
The fact that the additional fabs aren’t on the Wikipedia list isn’t dispositive. The Source of All Vaguely Accurate Knowledge relies on volunteer labor, and overwhelmingly English-speaking labor at that.
So let’s go to Google maps and take a look at the aerial view of them.
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) operates its Beijing semiconductor fabrication plant (known as Fab C1/C2) within the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area (BDA), also commonly referred to as the Yizhuang Development Zone in the southern suburbs of Beijing. Production at this specific memory/DRAM site began in 2022.
The primary location for this facility is: Building 52, No. 2 Jingyuan North Street
Beijing Economic-Technological Development Zone
Beijing, China
Great! Let’s pop that into Google Maps.
And here we run into multiple problems:
Problem 1: That’s an empty square in a parking lot outside “BDA International Business Park,” which includes multiple shops and restaurants within, so that’s obviously not a fab. Problem 2: It appears that Google’s “float over” street grid in Beijing is offset about a quarter mile east from the actual location. Problem 3: Adjusting that marker a quarter-mile west puts it in a cluster of much smaller buildings amidst trees, all of which are obviously too small to be fabs.
The specific facility and office address is: No. 51 Jinghai 3rd Road, Courtyard 1, Building 1 (Floors 1-5)Beijing Economic-Technological Development Zone, Beijing, China
Expanding further and further out using aerial views of Beijing in the general vicinity, I find a building complex that might, might qualify, as it has the extensive air-handling equipment that you might find on a fab:
But there’s no guarantee that’s it and not another big factory. (It might also be SMIC’s Beijing fab in the same general area, which Google seems to have trouble finding with any precision as well.)
Likewise, doing a Google image search on “CXMT beijing fab” brings up mostly greenfield artist renderings and pictures of other CXMT buildings, not an actual fab in a Beijing industrial zone. (By the way, the picture of the big building with the curved purple building in the bottom of the pic is an actual fab, but it’s Yangtze Memory Technologies’s NAND flash fab in Wuhan.)
There is no publicly confirmed street address for the CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies) fabrication plant in Beijing….
As of today, CXMT has not publicly disclosed the precise street address or GPS coordinates of the Beijing fab. Unlike many semiconductor companies that publish corporate campus addresses, this facility appears to be intentionally identified only at the industrial park level in public documentation.
As the kids say today, “Super sus, bro.”
What does CXMT’s own website say about their Beijing fab?
“2020.06 CXMT Fab C Project kicked off”
“2022.01 Operation began on Fab C1 (Beijing) trial production line”
OK, now I’m really suspicious. You don’t go from starting work on a fab to pilot production in 18 months, not even in China. Even without waiting for an ASML EUV stepper that they can’t get, the lead time for all the fab equipment alone is likely to be longer that.
To be fair, I couldn’t use Google maps to find their Hefei fab(s) either, but that one does come up in Apple Maps if you search for “Changxin Cunchu Technology Co., Ltd.” And scrolling around Google Maps does bring up some large buildings in that precise location, so I am willing to believe CXMT has one or more fabs there. But searching on “Changxin Cunchu Technology Co. Beijing China” brings up nothing on Apple Maps, and Google automatically changes the name to something else that isn’t a semiconductor company.
Remember, previous Chinese semiconductor companies have proven to be smoke and mirrors and shell games all the way down. Right now, I question whether CXMT even has a fab in Beijing. That doesn’t mean they don’t. The map is not the territory, and Google is obviously having problems with both their mapping and AI technology when it comes to China. (And this is also a lesson, once again, that AI can’t distinguish between truth and falsehood, as “garbage in, garbage out” still applies, and the Internet-based datasets the AI hyperscalers have been using to feed their baby Frankenstein monsters are full of garbage.) But CXMT would not be the first Chinese company to lie about their business to con the gullible. Or even the thousandth.
Anyway, if you have an actual reliable source (not a news article based on a tweet based on press releases) that CXMT has an actual fab in Beijing, feel free to share it in the comments below.
Two important speeches (from President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio) on leftwing threats to America, more welfare state fraud uncovered by Nick Shirley, Ukraine continues to hit Russian ships at will, multiple marine drone attacks, TSMC has a good week (and pledges to invest more money in America), Apple sues OpenAI, and Bruce Sterling compares AI to jazz.
Trump announced a massive declassification of documents showing how exposed our election system is to hacking and foreign interference. Top White House aides and intelligence agency chiefs have all reviewed and authenticated the documents.
The documents highlight major areas of concern. Starting in 2020, Beijing carried out the largest-ever compromise of election data. Some 220 million American voters’ files were meddled with by Chinese intelligence services. China signed a data exploitation unit for this project.
Members of the Deep State within the IC worked to suppress and downplay the scope and impact of China’s election interference. U.S. spy agencies discovered that the voter data breach in 18 states was bought, stolen, or hacked by China. That breach was kept hidden; Trump, who was still president at the time, was not informed, nor was Congress. The line was that the 2020 election was the most secure in history.
CIA reported in mid-2018 that the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements opposed to Trump. In mid-2019, China’s approach was to undermine domestic confidence during the first Trump presidency. The Chinese government aimed to identify anti-Trump reporters and pay them large sums of money to produce stories that cast Trump in a negative light.
The FBI obtained raw intelligence indicating that China’s activities included efforts to produce illegal ballots for Joe Biden. These were kept out of the presidential briefing. One analyst admitted to intentionally downplaying Chinese election activities. Another official stated she was running a shadow government to keep intelligence on China’s election interference away from the media and the White House. Numerous burn bags have been found.
Americans were lied to about the security of our election systems, including voting machines. They’re highly susceptible to attack. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors have the ability to compromise our election infrastructure.
Michigan police raided a Democrat GOTV organization and were so concerned they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that canvassers signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, registered nonexistent individuals, and got paid based on the number of applications they produced. The FBI believed crimes were committed, but the Biden DOJ slow-walked and suppressed the case.
Today at 9:40 p.m. ET, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) completed its latest major wave of strikes against Iran.
U.S. forces, including fighter jets, aerial drones, and warships, launched precision munitions that hit dozens of Iranian military targets such as coastal surveillance and air defense sites, military logistics infrastructure, and maritime capabilities. This was the sixth consecutive night of U.S. strikes against Iran.
At the Commander in Chief’s direction, CENTCOM is further degrading Iranian military capabilities and holding Iran accountable for recent attacks on commercial shipping.
More than 50,000 U.S. service members are operating across the Middle East and remain vigilant, lethal, and ready.
“U.S. forces resumed the naval blockade against vessels transiting to and from Iranian ports and coastal areas today [July 14] at 4 p.m. ET,” the command posted to social media on Tuesday.
“There are currently more than 20 U.S. Navy warships and hundreds of military aircraft operating across the Middle East. American forces remain vigilant, lethal, and ready,” the statement continued.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has requested that senior officials from more than 60 countries convene in Washington next Thursday to discuss the alarming rise of transnational far-left terrorism, according to a Washington Post report.
Snip.
The initiative is intended to expand intelligence sharing, law-enforcement cooperation and potential terrorist designations targeting militant groups with alleged ties to Antifa.
Administration officials have discussed whether foreign-terrorism links could unlock broader investigative and surveillance powers against US-based far-left revolutionaries that are a part of subversion networks.
The problem is that countries have been addressing far-left revolutionaries as a domestic threat, but in fact it’s transnational.
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the upcoming event is in response to the rise of the radical left. He said far-left terrorism is “an old threat re-emerging with strong transnational links and new convergences.”
“Because this threat has not been adequately addressed in the past, each engagement, designation, or security assistance program creates a compounding effect supporting countermeasures at home and abroad,” Pigott said in a statement.
In November, the State Department designated four European far-left groups as foreign terrorist organizations and directed agencies to investigate networks accused of fomenting political violence. One of the militant groups in Germany is called Antifa Ost. Two more were in Greece and one in Italy.
During the Antifa roundtable at the White House last October, Seamus Bruner, Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute, briefed the president and his cabinet on a complex network of dark-money NGOs and activist groups fueling unrest nationwide via the permanent protest-industrial complex.
“We have identified dozens of radical organizations, not just the decentralized Antifa organizations, but dozens of radical organizations that have received more than $100 million from the Riot Inc investors,” Bruner told Trump.
Jihadists attacks and plots in the United States are down by two-thirds since ISIS’s peak. The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 percent from the year 2015 to the year 2024. In other words, to a very great extent, our counterterrorism strategy has worked. The threat has not disappeared, of course. It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate immigration systems that imports these threats directly into our respective homelands. But this threat has been severely diminished. The world looks very different today because of it.
For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot – a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this organized – that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.
A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system – I’m sorry – that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary – well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.
For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched – so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.
It is why during those George Floyd – so-called George Floyd – riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through American great – America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now infamous image – and you all recall this – of a news anchor from a very prominent agency – a news anchor standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful. This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.
“Move over, Somali Learing Centers! Nick Shirley and Dr. Oz just visited Asian “adult daycares” and found a whole bunch of fraud.” “We uncovered over $190,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters use the elderly and needy to commit fraud through adult and personal home care scams in NYC. Your tax dollars are paying for elderly Koreans and Chinese to play ping pong and do tai chi, while the fraudsters give $ kickbacks to those who enroll.”
“I Watched the DSA Go Crazy. The Democrats May Be Next. The anti-democratic far Left is using the same strategy that helped them capture the Democratic Socialists of America.”
How worried should Democrats be about the Democratic Socialists of America? In the wake of a series of DSA victories in New York City, Jonathan Chait raised the alarm in The Atlantic, writing that as the group has risen in power, it has also grown “more hostile to the [Democratic] party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.” Long-time DSA members, including former staff member and thought leader David Duhalde and socialist magazine publisher Nathan J. Robinson, pushed back, dismissing Chait as someone who doesn’t know or understand the DSA.
Well, I know the DSA, and as someone who was a member and served in local leadership, I can say that Chait has it right: today’s DSA is not a harmless organization. It includes disciplined, radicalized networks that have methodically expanded their power over the last decade in pursuit of extremist goals.
As the Democratic Party grapples with the DSA’s growing influence and extremism, it would do well to recognize that the same dynamic underway now—first accommodation, then capture, then surrender to insurgent radicals—already played out on a smaller scale within the DSA itself. The only defense is to out-organize it.
For decades, the DSA was mostly composed of a cohort of aging Boomers left over from its founding in 1982. It prioritized open debate and political tolerance. Following in the tradition of founder Michael Harrington, members viewed the DSA not as a revolutionary vanguard but as a reformist bridge to mainstream labor-liberalism, and they prioritized parliamentary process and pluralism.
But in the mid-2010s, the character of the organization began to change. I was in Boston at the time and witnessed the last days of the “old” DSA. New, younger members began to enter the organization, while Senator Bernie Sanders and the socialist magazine Jacobin grew their followings.
As the DSA’s cultural power expanded and it began to amass electoral victories, more leftists of varying extremist commitments were drawn in. This was an explicit strategy called “the big tent,” advanced by the then-DSA Jacobin Left. In August 2025, DSA delegates voted to remove a constitutional provision barring Leninists from entry. The provision was already a dead letter.
The old DSA’s high-mindedness became its fatal weakness. Veteran members assumed the younger generation played by the same rules of persuasion, but the newcomers’ goal was not to win arguments—it was to transform the institution and its politics.
As the organization grew, it began to profess more extreme ideas—and demand that its members do the same. First there were the purity tests of Black Lives Matter and BDS, then apologia for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and support for Hamas and its atrocities.
The new DSA—with the help of hype-man Hasan Piker—advanced these agendas with what American labor leader Walter Reuther called “the Communists’ highly developed technique of name-calling and character assassination.” The Harringtonites fought back, but their efforts came far too late, and many prominent members of the older generation eventually left.
In a sense Jake Altman is wrong. The Democrat Party has largely already been captured by allied forces under the guise of “social justice” at the same time the commies were taking over the DSA, and were able to do it for much the same reasons: “no enemies on the left”, along with a heaping bowlful of white guilt.
A coalition of state financial officers said it uncovered roughly $225 million in alleged fraud across America’s schools over the past six years, identifying nearly 90 cases involving embezzlement, fake invoices, inflated enrollment, bid-rigging and kickbacks.
In a new report obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) and Open the Books analyzed every Education Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) Semiannual Report to Congress issued between Oct. 1, 2019, and March 31, 2026, revealing alleged fraud across 24 states and Puerto Rico.
Some other examples snipped.
In Texas, former Houston Independent School District Chief Operating Officer Brian Busby and contractor Anthony Hutchison allegedly orchestrated a fraud scheme of more than $6 million, involving school construction and grounds maintenance contracts in exchange for cash bribes and hundreds of thousands of dollars in home renovations.
A federal jury found Busby and Hutchison guilty of conspiracy, bribery, filing false tax returns, and witness tampering, with Hutchison also convicted on seven wire fraud counts, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.
“Bureaucratic bloat, insider dealing, and poor oversight prompted Governor Abbott and the Texas Education Agency to intervene in HISD and appoint new leadership,” HISD Superintendent Mike Miles told Fox News Digital. “School funding was being squandered, the quality of schools had deteriorated, and the majority of students’ education was being neglected. That is no longer the case. Since June 2023, we have made it a priority to eliminate waste and most importantly, now every decision we make is focused on closing student achievement gaps, preparing students for the future, and supporting teachers.”
More proof that Democrats in office are scumbags all the way down. “Swalwell pal Sen. Ruben Gallego had sexual relationships with two House staffers, sources reveal to The Post.”
Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, engaged in sexual relationships with at least two House staffers and his “very flirtatious” habits with others may come back to haunt him, The Post has learned.
The 46-year-old lawmaker admitted to the two relationships — both with aides to Texas Democrats — to one source while a second person said they had recently learned of the romantic entanglements.
A third source confirmed one of the dalliances, both of which are said to have been consensual and occurred during Gallego’s decade representing Phoenix in the House.
So he’s just an adulterer, not a rapist (as far as we know). Does this put him in the top half of senate Democrats for morality? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“Marine Drones Hit Two Russian Tankers: Magyar Hit 11 More Ships.” I’ve arranged these from most recent to least recent, which is all of five days ago.
“American Marine Drone Hits Iranian Submarine Repair Facility & Submarine at Bandar Abbas.” The drone used to attack the facility was the Corsair, manufactured by Austin company Saronic. Speaking of which:
“Sea Drone Company Saronic Announces $3.2 Billion Texas Shipyard. The company says the project is aimed at strengthening U.S. shipbuilding as autonomous vessels play an increasingly prominent role in modern warfare.”
Austin-based defense technology company Saronic, known for building autonomous watercraft, announced plans to invest more than $3.2 billion in a new shipyard at the Port of Brownsville that is expected to create 10,000 jobs.
Gov. Greg Abbott joined Saronic CEO Dino Mavrookas Thursday at the company’s Austin headquarters to announce the project, known as Port Alpha.
The shipyard’s initial phase will occupy more than 800 acres, with the potential to expand to more than 4,000 acres. Saronic plans to break ground this year and begin producing ships in 2028.
“The initial phase of Port Alpha will more than double America’s shipbuilding capacity today and will make it the largest shipyard in the country,” said Mavrookas.
Port Alpha will be designed for advanced manufacturing, software-based production, and autonomous vessels.
Mavrookas framed the project as a response to the decline of American shipbuilding and the increasing maritime capabilities of China.
“Today, China is now outbuilding the United States in shipbuilding capacity 230 to one,” he said.
“A nation that cannot build ships cannot project power, cannot protect its supply chains, and cannot defend its interests,” Mavrookas added. “We are at that moment right now. Port Alpha is our answer.”
Saronic designs and manufactures autonomous vessels for the U.S. military, including the Corsair, Mirage, and Marauder.
This is good news for American drone manufacturing (and shipbuilding). However, on a personal level, I note that Saronic has had the same technical writing position open for most of this year. Indeed, I’ve applied for it multiple times when listed, but gotten no contacts save form replies. Maybe with all their new activity they’ll finally be hiring…
Former Obama staffer accused of stealing from colleagues to fund drug habit.
Adam Fetcher, 42, was let go from his role as Chief Communications Officer for the City of Minneapolis last week amid a police probe, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported.
According to the outlet, Fetcher, who earned $186,495 a year in his role, is accused of stealing cash and credit cards from three of his colleagues and racking up fraudulent charges in smoke shops.
Fetcher’s drug of choice was Kratom, “a substance which is used to manage opioid withdrawal.”
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy wants the Trump administration to crack down on legal immigration after last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision thwarting a presidential executive order to address birthright citizenship.
In a letter to the Trump administration, Roy (R–Austin) said that while the administration works to secure the nation from illegal immigration, the current level of legal immigration should be reassessed to ensure that the “economic opportunities, cultural and social cohesion, or security” of American citizens is not negatively impacted.
Expressing concern about increasing pressure on housing, schools, and healthcare services, Roy wrote that the “American people deserve transparency so we can ensure our immigration system puts American workers, taxpayers, and communities first.”
According to the congressman, the U.S. takes in approximately one million legal immigrants each year because of the Immigration Act of 1990. This accounts for roughly 34 million immigrants over the last 35 years. He also explained that more than 10 million nonimmigrant visas are issued to visitors such as guest workers, foreign students, and tourists.
Roy went on to cite an analysis of last year’s Current Population Survey (CPS) by the Center for Immigration Studies, which highlighted legal and illegal immigrant totals of “53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025.”
Ashrafuzzaman Khan, a former top official of the Islamic Circle of North America in Queens, New York, personally slaughtered seven university professors as the chief executioner of Jamaat-e-Islami’s Al Badr death squads during the 1971 Bangladesh massacre. Despite being convicted in absentia of war crimes, he helped build one of America’s largest Muslim organizations and continues to live freely in the United States.
Here’s a weird Texas crime story: “Lavaca County Justice of the Peace Commits Suicide Following Arrest for Compelling Prostitution, Sexual Assault. Travis Hill had been a fugitive since Monday, when he failed to appear for a pre-trial appointment.” Lavaca County is in south central Texas between Houston and Seguin on highway 90.
A Lavaca County justice of the peace who was arrested earlier this month on felony charges committed suicide on Thursday as law enforcement agents attempted to arrest him a second time.
Precinct 2 Justice of the Peace Travis Mitchell Hill was arrested July 11 on first- degree felony charges of compelling prostitution, second-degree sexual assault, and solicitation of prostitution, but reportedly had been released on bond.
Usually, compelling prostitution is upgraded to a first-degree felony when the victim is a minor.
The Lavaca County Sheriff’s Office was made aware of allegations against Hill six weeks ago, but since Hill was an elected official and a practicing criminal defense attorney, Lavaca County Attorney James Reeves recused himself and referred the case to the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG). The Texas Rangers were leading the investigation.
Hill did not appear for a pre-trial appointment Monday, when he was supposed to receive an ankle monitor. The U.S. Marshal’s Office was assisting local law enforcement with locating him on Thursday.
According to a statement issued by Reeves, Hill was located Thursday evening “at a remote location in Gonzales County, Texas. During law enforcement’s encounter with Mr. Hill, he committed suicide.” No other details were provided.
“Hill was appointed as justice of the peace in 2011 by the Lavaca County Commissioners Court. He had reportedly previously run as a Democrat for Lavaca County district clerk in the March 2011 primary, but switched to the Republican Party sometime later.” There are no more details about the charges against him online that I can find.
Follow-up: Remember the killing of Tory-turned-reform MP Ann Widdecombe in last week’s LinkSwarm? Turns out the suspect arrested is probably a commie. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.
“Houston Man Killed by ICE, Hailed as Father Chasing ‘American Dream,’ Had Meth in His Car.” That would be illegal alien Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who tried to run over an ice agent in his truck.
Unexpected headlines: “A tech company is repurposing its sexbots into AI teachers’ aides and they’re already being used in at least one New York state school.”
As Flock cameras are installed across the nation, citizens are growing more concerned about the potential privacy violations posed by automatic license plate readers.
On Friday, U.S. Rep. Keith Self wrote on X that “[i]f transparency is now considered a threat, we’ve already drifted too far from the principles of a free Republic,” responding to an article about Flock’s CEO, who said that it is “terroristic” for the public to want to know where the company’s automatic license plate readers are being installed.
Flock cameras do not act like traditional license plate readers. Powered by AI, they capture details such as the make and model of a passing vehicle, as well as any unique or identifying features such as dents, scratches, stickers, and aftermarket parts.
The ALPRs also capture data on vehicles, regardless of whether they have been implicated in a crime. Police departments do not need a search warrant to access Flock data, heightening concerns about Fourth Amendment violations.
“TSMC posts record revenue in second quarter on AI demand.” “Revenue in the April-June period of this year came in at T$1.27 trillion ($39.62 billion), according to Reuters calculations, slightly above a T$1.264 trillion LSEG SmartEstimate drawn from 20 analysts.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
We’re living in an Age of AI. Why was there a “Jazz Age”? Why did jazz create an “Age”? Why was there this period between the Great War and the Great Depression, where a new form of music was very important, and people around the world cared about it?
You can theorize about jazz. You can say that there were social reasons: that jazz was fun and new and sexy, and women wanted to wear short skirts and dance the Charleston.
Or you could say that jazz was infrastructural — that music from the town of New Orleans could be recorded, and exported, and transmitted on the radio. There were new forms of mass media, so it was easier to spread a viral fad, around the world. So, that somehow explains jazz.
Or you could say that jazz was political — that there was an oppressed class of black people living under apartheid, and jazz musicians and composers were making their voices heard.
Or you could say that the Great War had just ended, and it was followed by a plague of flu that killed even more people than the worst war in history. You might say that jazz was a method for musicians to rescue mankind by changing the subject. Jazz was strange and extreme, because it was denying and avoiding the trauma of a lost generation. With more trauma — depression and war — well on the way.
It’s pretty clear to me that the generation of AI — and it’s been going on for ten years, it’s a generation — has a lot of that unspoken Jazz Age anguish. It’s a vivid displacement activity for a lost and troubled era.
I’m a novelist, so I notice the peculiar emotional expressions here. I notice things like AI burnout, AI psychosis, unhealthy relations with imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends, AI fakes, stock market bubbles, and the fear of missing out. That stark fear. So much fear. The fear of missing that golden chance. Also, the fear that AI is real this time, and is really happening. The apocalyptic terror that AI will lead to the destruction of the world.
This is not the cyberpunk dystopian dark side of AI. This is the propulsive force of AI. It’s the restless and itchy drive that forces you to leave your apartment and rush downtown to the jazz club.
Why do you go? The jazz club is not a place for the angels. You might drink bootleg liquor there and become an alcoholic. Or you might get in a fight, or catch a venereal disease. There’s cocaine and marijuana there. Someone might mug you and take your purse or wallet. But also, in New York, Duke Ellington is playing! In Paris, Django Reinhart is playing! It may be a wild scene, but you’re crazy not to go!
This is the high summer of AI. The scene is red hot. I’ve been aware of AI for my entire, extensive lifetime, and it’s never been this technically intense and this deeply felt. Rational people, with education and money and power and experience, are cracking up in public. They’re losing their heads over it. Billionaires, captains of industry, politicians, military, spies. Worldwide. Old and young, men and women.
It’s a craze.
I’m very interested in it. I follow its every little up and down. It is so far out and science fictional that it might have been built just to entertain elderly cyberpunk writers. I do not invest in it. I’m not selling any of it to you. I don’t use it much personally. It isn’t changing my life — not much as yet. I’m not afraid of it. I don’t even think it will last. It’s defining an era, an era which is ten years old and counting, but something else will show up. AI is not a fraud, or pretense, or a fake. It’s a real and powerful technology and we’re never going back to the way things were. I recognize all that, but also, I take consolation in continuity.
Chinese commie money is helping fund American commie wins, Rapey McNazi drops out, Ukrainian drones feast on Russian ships and hit Russia’s largest oil refinery (among others), Labour wants to install Big Brother into YouTube, and a victory for right to repair. Plus: Trebuchet!
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Non-link summary of the state of Iran war: Bombing currently paused, but the ceasefire is over and, oh yeah, supposedly Iran is plotting to assassinate
President Trump.
One of the most consequential groups behind the surge of radical leftist candidates in New York’s and Colorado’s congressional primaries was a super PAC formed earlier this year, calling itself American Priorities. After filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in February of this year, the group pledged to spend more than $10 million during the 2026 midterms and declared that its goal, according to founder Hannah Fertig, was “to make sure that someone’s there to protect candidates who question these [pro-Israel] policies,” countering the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The group invested about $2 million in supporting Adam Hamawy, an Egyptian-born physician who has testified on behalf of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheikh convicted of seditious conspiracy for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Thanks in part to the group’s generous contributions, Hamawy handily won the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th District.
American Priorities then spent an additional $2 million across the river in New York, contributing to the successful campaigns of Brad Lander, who unseated the incumbent, Congressman Dan Goldman, in a campaign focused largely on vilifying Israel, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who unseated Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District while doubling down on a host of controversial statements, from using the American flag as a napkin to supporting Hamas in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023. The super PAC also spent $150,000 on TV ads to help democratic socialist Melat Kiros win Colorado’s 1st District primary.
Who, then, is behind American Priorities?
Public reports reveal that the group’s two largest donors, by far, are Omer Hasan and Mohammad Waqas Javed, who were described in the press as former Silicon Valley executives who recently became involved in politics and about whom “little is publicly known.”
But Hasan and Javed, as a simple web search reveals, are both alums of the same company, the mobile advertising and data company AppLovin, founded in 2012.
The company’s path to becoming one of the world’s most highly valued ad tech companies is highly unorthodox. According to The Economist, for example, the company’s share price has climbed more than 30-fold between 2022 and 2025, an astonishing feat for any company but particularly for one that, for years, wallowed in obscurity in the murky waters of app-monetization solutions.
In 2018, six years after it was launched, the company introduced a mobile-gaming publishing arm. “The result,” explained ad tech analyst Rio Longacre, “was a self-reinforcing flywheel: more games meant more first-party data, which fueled better optimization, which in turn strengthened both the AdTech stack and the company’s foothold in the gaming ecosystem.” Which, naturally, also raised considerable concerns: AppLovin was now both running the advertising platform and selling inventory, which inspired many critics to strongly doubt the validity of the numbers it was reporting.
But the company’s growth—and the vehemence of its critics—grew far more exponentially in 2022, when it pivoted away from being primarily a gaming company to “an AdTech company powered by AI-driven performance optimization,” a giant de facto machine learning operation. The company’s many detractors, Longacre noted, now charged it with “money flowing between entities the public can’t fully scrutinize, creating the illusion of third-party demand when some of it may simply be internal recycling. They also highlight the quality of traffic inside the system, pointing to patterns that resemble click-farm-adjacent behavior—bursts of installs from low-value regions, strange retention curves, and activity that seems optimized more for algorithmic signaling than real user engagement.”
To assess the validity of these claims, it helps to know who AppLovin partners with. In 2016, the company agreed to be bought by Orient Hontai Capital, a state-backed Chinese private equity firm. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency government body dedicated to monitoring the national security implications of large-scale business transactions, objected, and the deal was subsequently amended.
The Chinese connection, however, was far from over: One of the company’s largest investors is one Hao Tang, who, according to regulatory filings in 2025, owned 3.2% of AppLovin, valued at roughly $4.6 billion. Other reports claim that Tang controls, through shell companies, at least 9.8% of Class A shares, making him the company’s largest individual shareholder beside AppLovin’s CEO, Adam Foroughi, who told Fox News in April, when AppLovin was trying to acquire TikTok’s non-Chinese assets, that he remains the largest shareholder.
Snip.
At the moment, $2 million of American Priorities’ war chest comes from Hasan and Javed (an additional $500,000 came from another former AppLovin team member, Tariq Afaq Ahmed, according to FEC filings). As attention on both the left and the right continues to focus on AIPAC and its alleged impact on American politics, it’s worth noticing that the most prominent PAC on the scene right now is funded primarily by two veterans of a shady tech colossus with strong links to China and repeated allegations of ties to the Communist Party in Beijing.
A new analysis from a Texas think tank found a correlation between district attorneys’ non-prosecution policies and increases in crime, but with few state options for addressing so-called “rogue” prosecutors, the group suggests that Texas lawmakers should consider reforms next year.
Ross Jackson, a senior policy analyst for Right on Crime at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said he has been researching the issue since last fall.
“There are correlations that are particularly evident in Austin and Minneapolis and some other cities around the country and it’s more evident in cities and counties where there hasn’t historically been a huge crime rate like in Austin,” Jackson told The Texan.
According to Jackson’s report, Austin experienced one of the most dramatic surges in violent and property crimes in recent years, which saw the city’s homicide rate climb by over 60 percent between 2016 and 2024.
Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza, who was first elected in 2020, has been accused of dropping or reducing charges in hundreds of criminal cases, including one in which an appeals court had called for a new trial. Last year, Garza’s office reportedly failed to bring timely indictments for crimes that included violent felonies, leading to the dismissals of hundreds of cases.
Attempts to remove Garza through House Bill (HB) 17, a state law enacted in 2023, have failed, and he has ignored calls for his resignation over mishandled cases. Jackson noted that HB 17 is limited to removing district attorneys who officially adopt non-prosecution policies in conflict with state law, and does not apply to those who adopt informal policies or internal guidance.
Jackson noted that some proposed legislative remedies face high hurdles.
The policy solutions examined by Jackson include mechanisms to discipline or remove district attorneys, as well as avenues for prosecuting serious crimes when the local district attorney or a county prosecuting attorney fails to do so.
One possibility suggested by Jackson is creation of a new state commission to provide oversight and administer discipline. The model he suggested is based on the state’s former Prosecuting Attorneys Coordinating Council that operated between 1977 and 1983. While state lawmakers could create such a council through statute, Jackson noted that an amendment to the Texas Constitution would be needed to allow the council to remove district attorneys.
Constitutional amendments require the support of two thirds of both chambers of the Legislature, which usually requires bipartisan support, as well as approval by voters in a statewide election.
Jackson also noted that state lawmakers could give authority to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct to discipline rogue prosecutors, but giving it a removal mechanism would also likely require a constitutional amendment.
One possibility for prosecuting cases dropped by prosecutors would be to give that power to the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG). Under a 2021 Texas Criminal Court of Appeals opinion, the OAG may only prosecute cases referred by a local district attorney or county attorney.
“Unless the Court reverses their decision, giving the OAG that authority would definitely require a constitutional amendment,” said Jackson. “I think that would be the most difficult option legislatively, just given the partisan nature of that position. I don’t see many crossover voters on something like that.”
Other options include creating a state prosecutor or creating five new regional district attorneys, each anchored in one of Texas’ urban areas.
Jackson says that lawmakers appear to have the authority to create a state prosecutor or regional district attorneys through statute, but the regional approach may also require a constitutional amendment and may necessitate the creation of new courts — a more costly option for taxpayers.
Earlier this year, Gov. Greg Abbott cited Garza’s history as Travis County’s district attorney in his call for new legislation to create a statewide prosecutor and a mechanism for removing rogue prosecutors. Texas Sen. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston), now the GOP nominee for state attorney general, has also voiced support for a statewide prosecutor.
In addition to Garza, Jackson’s report identified concerns over district attorney policies in both Bexar and Dallas counties. In Bexar County, District Attorney Joe Gonzales gave local law enforcement officers the option to issue tickets for certain “drug, theft, and traffic misdemeanors in lieu of jail time,” and Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot announced that he would no longer pursue charges against “low-level, first-time drug offenders.” Cruezot rescinded a previous policy in 2022 of declining to prosecute low-level theft.
The FBI has arrested 113 active spies from foreign nations, agency director Kash Patel said on Wednesday.
The arrests of foreign spies “means our tech stays home and our defense secrets stay locked down,” a video shared by Patel on X said. “But the FBI didn’t stop there. They forced 62 removals of Chinese spies in 2026 alone.”
The video added that this has shattered the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) deep cover operations against the United States.
The House Committee on Homeland Security released a report in February 2025 detailing multiple cases of espionage conducted by the CCP in the United States since 2021.
The cases, spread across 20 U.S. states, involved the transmission of sensitive military information to Beijing, stealing trade secrets to benefit the regime, transnational repression schemes targeting Chinese dissidents, and obstruction of justice. Every 12 hours, the FBI opened new cases to counter Beijing’s intelligence operations, according to the report.
The report noted that the CCP’s theft of U.S. intellectual property amounts to roughly $4,000 to $6,000 annually per American family of four after paying taxes.
In one prominent case, a senior adviser to the State Department was arrested in October 2025, accused of taking thousands of top-secret documents and meeting with Chinese officials. The individual allegedly downloaded and saved documents related to U.S. fighter jets and weapons capabilities.
On Jan. 12 this year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a former U.S. Navy sailor was sentenced to 200 months in prison for spying for Beijing.
The person had access to sensitive national defense information about the amphibious assault ship U.S.S. Essex, such as its weapons, propulsion, and desalination systems. These ships are a “cornerstone of the U.S. Navy’s amphibious readiness and expeditionary strike capabilities,” according to the DOJ statement. The sailor sold critical information to a Chinese intelligence officer for $12,000.
More recently, on June 4, the DOJ announced that a U.S. citizen pleaded guilty to acting as an agent for China. The man, who lived in China, would travel to the United States to meet with individuals who could provide him, and ultimately the Chinese Ministry of State Security, with important information.
Finally: “Vance announces investigation into alleged H-1B visa fraud.”
Vice President JD Vance announced Wednesday that the Trump administration has opened an investigation into allegations of fraud within the H-1B visa program, which allows foreign workers to legally work in the United States on a temporary basis.
The visas allow U.S. companies to hire high-skilled foreign workers to serve in occupations such as healthcare, technology and education, while critics argued big businesses use the program to import cheap labor to replace Americans.
“Big corporations and fraudsters overseas are using this program to undercut the wages of American workers,” Vance said in a speech in Milwaukee. “If you are trying to take advantage of that visa program, you are not allowed into the United States.”
President Donald Trump tapped Vance as his “fraud czar” in early April. Since his appointment, he has overseen major fraud busts across the nation, including against allegedly fraudulent hospices in Los Angeles and other operations in Minneapolis and Maine.
Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said the administration is also investigating alleged fraud in the Permanent Labor Certification visa process, and that investigators have already begun to issue dozens of subpoenas in relation to the probe.
“This is another example where fraud is fueling violent crime,” D’Esposito told Fox Business. “Much of the visa and the human trafficking that we see when it comes to this foreign labor is tied to cartels, is tied to transnational gangs, and this is the work that we should be doing, not only to make America safe again, but to make America more affordable again.”
“Ukrainian Drones Hit Omsk Refinery! Russia’s Largest! Su-57’s Deployed in Defence!” As I’ve said before, if they can hit Omsk, they should target the Transiberian railway bridge over the Irtysh river.
Hours after USA Today published an interview between one of its journalists and Cuban President Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the communist-run island experienced an island-wide power grid collapse.
The electrical workers’ union said the entire power grid went offline and that officials were investigating the cause. Cuba’s energy ministry confirmed the blackout and said crews were working to restore service.
“A total disconnection of the National Electric Power System is occurring. The causes are being investigated,” the electrical workers’ union wrote on X.
And that was the first blackout. It just blacked out again today…
According to Transparency USA, Soros has already funneled over $1 million into the Texas Majority PAC. The federal American Bridge PAC, long aligned with Soros, has contributed $7.57 million to the Texas Majority PAC.
The Soros family has poured a staggering $103 million nationwide into the 2026 election cycle so far.
The Texas Majority PAC exists to turn Texas into a blue state by electing Democrats to statewide offices.
Snip.
Texas Gun Rights is warning that Texas Majority PAC-backed candidates, including James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa, Vikki Goodwin, Nathan Johnson, Sarah Eckhardt, Jon Rosenthal, and Clayton Tucker, support radical anti-gun policies such as red flag laws, raising the age to purchase guns, gun-registration schemes, and the outright banning and seizure of common semi-automatic firearms.
“Soros and his allies are not investing millions in Texas because they think this is a lost cause. They are doing it because they believe Texas can be flipped,” warned Texas Gun Rights President Chris McNutt.
“Abbott Appoints Comptroller Candidate Don Huffines to Fill Outgoing Hancock’s Unexpired Term.” Huffines ran against Abbott for the 2022 Republican gubernatorial nomination.
A federal appellate court has upheld an agreement between Texas and the Trump administration ending in-state tuition for illegal aliens in compliance with federal law.
The Texas Dream Act, enacted in 2001, formerly allowed qualifying illegal alien students to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities.
In June 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the State of Texas, arguing that federal law preempted the Texas Dream Act.
According to the suit, federal law preempts any state rules that grant illegal aliens benefits not afforded to all U.S. citizens. The Texas Dream Act did this because U.S. citizens from outside the state were forced to pay higher rates than the qualifying aliens.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ultimately agreed with the DOJ, settling the case.
Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar, the brother of Democrat U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, faces a state court hearing Thursday as proceedings move forward in an effort to remove him from office while he awaits trial on federal fraud and money laundering charges.
A docket control conference is set for 9 a.m. in the 49th District Court in the case seeking Cuellar’s removal under Chapter 87 of the Texas Local Government Code.
The removal petition was filed in May by former Laredo City Councilman Alfonso “Poncho” Casso, who alleges Cuellar committed official misconduct based on the conduct underlying a federal criminal indictment returned last year.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Cuellar conspired with former Webb County Sheriff’s Office Assistant Chief Ricardo Rodriguez and others to operate a private disinfecting business during the COVID-19 pandemic using sheriff’s office employees, equipment, and other county resources.
Federal prosecutors allege the business, Disinfect Pro Master, secured a $500,000 contract to disinfect schools in the United Independent School District while relying almost entirely on sheriff’s office personnel and supplies to perform the work.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows sent a letter this week to the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston (UTHealth Houston), University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), and Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC).
The letter refers to Senate Bill (SB) 2308, passed in the 89th Legislature, which created a state-sponsored consortium for the purpose of conducting research and clinical trials into ibogaine, a naturally occurring psychoactive compound. The drug is being studied for its potential benefit for those suffering from traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and other mental health conditions.
However, as the letter affirms, no proposals set forth by pharmaceutical companies met the standards required for the state to move forward with clinical trials.
Patrick and Burrows commented on the lack of readiness to proceed: “This should not preclude the State of Texas from independently proceeding with this vital work through our university research partners as spelled out in the March 31 press release from both the House and Senate.”
The press release in reference announced Texas’ allocation of $50 million toward research into the drug.
American video-sharing platform YouTube told users in Britain that, under pressure from the left-wing Labour Party government, independent creators will likely see their content suppressed.
The British government has been accused of attempting to silence political opposition, with YouTube telling UK creators that proposed new rules would include a “prominence regime” that would force sites like YouTube to give a “privileged position” to the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and other legacy media.
The notice said that artificially propping up establishment media would naturally result in independent media being downranked and obscured from view, as “pushing this group forward means pushing everyone else downward. Mandatory prioritisation of broadcasters would affect how your content reaches your audience, regardless of what your audience actually wants to see.”
“Mandating prominence for established media networks would push the UK’s diverse mix of independent journalists, educators, and digital-first businesses down the line,” YouTube added.
Snip.
The government is said to have told the site that legacy broadcasters had the “trust” of the state to provide accurate reporting, which YouTube noted implies that “digital-first voices are less credible, damaging the foundational trust that sustains the creator economy.”
Translation: Labour to suppress coverage of Muslim rape gangs and anything else that makes it look bad.
This comes despite the BBC recently facing significant scandals involving the accuracy of its reporting, including last year when it was forced to apologise to U.S. President Trump after a documentary produced by the public broadcaster deceptively spliced together different sections of his speech on January 6th 2021, to falsely give the impression that he had encouraged supporters to riot, when he did the exact opposite.
Just last month, the BBC was also forced to issue an apology to Brexit leader Nigel Farage after one of its presenters fabricated fictitious quotes from the Reform UK leader in the wake of the killing of handcuffed teen Henry Nowak.
Commenting on the notice from YouTube, Mr Farage said: “Look at this appalling state censorship. Labour now want to seize control of YouTube’s algorithm. They want YouTube to artificially boost the BBC and Channel 4’s content, and suffocate independent journalists and producers.
“The BBC has been biased to pro-mass migration, open borders, and Net Zero views these past few decades. It’s part of the reason we’re in a mess. The BBC’s own internal reports admit and document some of this bias.
“People have moved to X and YouTube in part as a response to it. And now, Labour want to control what they see there? Reform will scrap this heavy handed lunacy.”
Listen to this extraordinary exchange between [GB News Broadcaster] Camilla Tominey and Labour’s Health Secretary James Murray. It is genuinely jaw-dropping.
Camilla: “You’re quite pro-trans, aren’t you? Do you think a woman can have a penis? Because you did previously?”
Murray: “No, I don’t.”
Camilla: “So you’ve changed your mind?”
Murray: “Yes.”
Camilla: “Why?”
Murray stumbles. He says he’s been thinking about the issue over recent years and would not now say trans women are women.
The Labour Party is in many ways more loony than the Democrats. If tranny madness has broken there, maybe it’s finally receding globally.
Speaking of the UK, former Tory and current Reform MP Ann Widdecombe was murdered in her home. Police have a 26 year old man in custody.
“ICE Agent Fatally Shot Man During Houston Operation in Self-Defense. Federal officials say a Mexican national used his truck as a weapon during a Magnolia Park enforcement operation before an ICE agent shot him.” Magnolia Park is an old Houston neighborhood southeast of downtown along Buffalo Bayou.
The man has been identified as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents attempted to stop Salgado Araujo’s vehicle around 6:50 a.m. in the 6800 block of Canal Street. DHS said Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle, ignored multiple verbal commands and used his vehicle in an attempt to run over an agent, who then fired his weapon in self-defense. Three other people were detained during the stop.
Salgado Araujo suffered a gunshot wound to his abdomen, according to the Houston Fire Department, and was taken to Ben Taub Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Two separate federal investigations are now underway. The FBI’s Houston field office is investigating a possible assault on a federal officer, while the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General is reviewing the shooting itself.
Houston police said they have no role in the case and referred questions to federal authorities.
“Texas Stock Exchange Has Officially Begun Trading. TXSE officially opened its doors to begin trading on Monday.”
Based in Dallas, TXSE began its phased rollout in July. The firm’s launch comes as major financial institutions, including BlackRock and Citadel Securities, have invested over $120 million in the new exchange since 2024. The exchange gained federal approval last year and attracted investment from several other firms, bringing total investment to more than $275 million.
TXSE opened its doors at 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning to approved brokers, banks, and trading firms. For now, brokers are trading only test stocks. Thousands of symbols, such as TSLA (Tesla), will come online in July, with an announcement to precede it. That rollout will officially allow the public to trade stocks on the exchange.
TXSE officials also hope to have exchange-traded products, or ETPs, trading by the end of the third quarter. ETPs allow investors to gain exposure to a wide variety of investment products, such as oil or the S&P 500.
While all trading is primarily done through electronic mediums, exchange locations still matter because brokers predominantly invest in local businesses. TXSE has the ingredients for success, including a large number of Fortune 500 companies that have recently relocated to Texas and a rapidly growing financial district in Dallas.
Stockbrokers tend to make a fair bit of money, and Dallas will enjoy some second order economic benefits from having the exchange there.
At just 16 years old, Calla Walsh was celebrated by the New York Times as part of an “influential new force in Democratic politics” for her work on the campaigns of Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.)
But six years on, Walsh is making headlines again for a much different reason: She recently appeared in an Iranian state-media interview calling the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the “greatest anti-imperialist leader” of her lifetime.
Walsh, now a 22-year-old full-time resident of Lebanon, has descended from a progressive wunderkind to a radical who has been placed on a suspicious persons watch list by the U.S. government for her “expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran … as well as a spiderweb of U.S.-designated terrorist groups,” according to the Free Press.
“He was a leader to all people of the world who struggle against imperialism, arrogance, against Zionism, against genocide,” Walsh said of Khamenei while speaking with Iran’s PressTV about her attendance at his funeral Saturday.
Snip.
At just 14, she knocked on doors in Cambridge to encourage residents to support a bill that would prohibit “gender-identity-based discrimination” in public places. One year later, she helped coordinate thousands of young protesters for an international “climate strike” at Boston’s City Hall. At 17, she served as one of the youngest delegates at the Democratic Socialist of America’s National Convention. That same year, the Boston Globe called her a “force in the world of climate activism.”
She volunteered for Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign and also helped Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s campaign.
She received significant notoriety for her efforts in the “Markeyverse” in 2020, an online Gen Z–led movement credited with helping the incumbent senator secure a 2020 primary win over then–Representative Joe Kennedy III. “The Markeyverse carried out a devastating political maneuver, firmly fixing the idea of Senator Markey as a left-wing icon,” the Times reported.
She went on to hold several other roles in Democratic politics: She served as communications director for Massachusetts state house candidate Jordan Meehan, and she did digital-media work for Boston City Councilor Julia Mejia’s reelection campaign in 2021. She also worked as a regional organizer and strategist for Act on Mass, a progressive nonprofit.
But the candidates she was working to elect were falling short of her increasingly radical politics. Just two months after she helped to secure Markey’s reelection, she was already protesting outside his office, according to the Free Press. She partnered with CodePink and The People’s Forum to protest the senator’s support for a bill to increase U.S. defense spending in East Asia.
The makings of her radicalization were beginning to fall in place as early as 2021, when she was invited to Cuba at just 17 years old. She then visited the country four times between 2022 and 2024.
By the end of 2021, Walsh announced her exit from the Democratic Party and electoral politics. She explained that she’d been disappointed by Markey in the aftermath of his reelection win and that she’d learned that no party or candidate could spur the revolutionary change she wanted — it might be achieved only by “direct action, protest, and internationalist solidarity.”
Soon after, she posted a Me Too account of an inappropriate relationship she had with a 27-year-old campaign field director in Massachusetts when she was just 16. She and the older man had sexually explicit conversations during a yearlong relationship that included in-person meetings but did not involve sex.
“Most of the interactions I have with men and adults I work with in politics are tainted by my trauma and fears of being sexually exploited again,” she wrote.
In addition to her trips to Cuba, Walsh also notably appeared in Chinese state-media propaganda videos in 2022 to criticize then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for leading a congressional delegation to Taiwan. Walsh was involved, at least for a time, with CodePink and The People’s Forum which are led by Neville Roy Singham and his wife, Jodie Evans, who are both under investigation for their suspected ties to Chinese intelligence services.
Her trips to Cuba ultimately led to her introduction to Fergie Chambers, a Marxist organizer and millionaire heir to the Cox Communications empire. Walsh met Chambers, who is 20 years her senior, at a 2022 conference in Cuba. That meeting seemed to supercharge her extremism.
Democrat, liberal, progressive, social justice warrior, radical, extremist, socialist, communist, terrorist. It’s funny how, say, 40 years ago, these were distinct categories, but now it’s an ever tightening Venn diagram of extremism. What’s the line between a “progressive” and an “extremist”? The first time they assault a Jew?
We previously covered Walsh’s pro-Ayatollah policies here.
Important safety note for Windows users: Microsoft’s GDID can track you even if you use a VPN.
A victory for right to repair: “FTC chairman announces settlement with John Deere to let farmers fix their own equipment again.”
The Federal Trade Commission, along with five states, secured an important settlement in an antitrust lawsuit against farm equipment manufacturer Deere & Company that will ensure farmers can enjoy the right to repair their own John Deere tractors and farm equipment.
For the next decade, Deere will be required to give farmers and independent repair shops “the same equipment repair resources, including applicable software capabilities” as its stealerships – err, dealerships.
‘Today’s settlement enables farmers to do what they’ve done for generations — fix their own tractors and other farm equipment — without having to pay an authorized John Deere dealer to do it for them,’ said FTC Bureau of Competition Director Daniel Guarnera. ‘The settlement with Deere will help lower costs for American farmers. The FTC will continue fighting against anticompetitive restrictions on American consumers’ right to repair.’
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…
A class action lawsuit has been filed against memory giants Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron alleging the nefarious, cartel like action of…making the products with the highest profit margins.
The world’s biggest memory chip makers are once again facing accusations of manipulating prices.
A class-action lawsuit filed on Thursday, June 25, in a California federal court alleges that Samsung Electronics (SSNLF), SK Hynix (SKHY), and Micron Technology (MU) coordinated to restrict DRAM supply and push prices sharply higher during the AI boom.
The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California under case number 3:26-cv-06345, claims the companies reduced production of traditional DDR3 and DDR4 memory while shifting capacity toward high-margin AI memory products such as HBM chips used in data centers.
Not to mention DDR5.
However, the companies have not been found liable for now, and no trial date is set.
According to the lawsuit, DRAM prices have surged nearly 500%-700% over the past four years, reported Time of India. Plaintiffs argued that in a competitive market, rising prices should attract more supply, but production cuts continued instead.
Snip.
According to Jefferies, memory prices could rise another 40%-50% next quarter and 30%-40% more in the following quarter, reported analysts like Bull Theory on X, with normalization unlikely before 2028. The rising memory costs are already filtering into consumer electronics prices worldwide.
Does this situation suck if you’re trying to buy or build a new PC with lots of RAM? Absolutely. But there’s no nefarious market coordination at work among those big three, just the confluence of a variety of market trends. So let’s break it down:
Manufacturers switching production from a less profitable product to a more profitable product isn’t some nefarious conspiracy, it’s how the market works. If they’re getting premium pricing for HBM memory that sells out instantly for the AI bubble, that’s what they’re going to produce. A whole lot of tech companies depended on the spot market for RAM because it gave them more flexibility and costs savings, but now it’s biting them in the ass. Their lack of foresight does not indicate a conspiracy or market failure.
Why are there only three big RAM manufacturers? Because a whole lot of other companies dropped out of the market because the game became too expensive to play. RAM makes money hand-over-fist during boom times (like now), but barely breaks even during busts. A whole lot of different companies used to produce memory, Intel and Texas Instruments among them. Remember when Japan Inc. was going to take over the world and the Japanese semiconductor giants (NEC, Toshibu, Fujitsu, Hitachi, etc.) were accused (with some justification) of dumping RAM below cost to capture market share with the backing of state agency MITI? None of those Japanese giants are in RAM any more because, in the wake of the Japanese asset bubble busting in 1991, building new state-of-the-art fabs that doubled in price every four years became a game too expensive for them to play.
Rising prices should attract more supply, but it takes about three years and costs about $25 billion to build a state-of-the-art fab. Because standard memory technology still has a capacitance limit, you don’t necessarily need an under-10nm fab, so maybe you can spend a bit less, but you’re still spending over $10 billion on a fab, and you probably still need an ASML EUV stepper, though not the very latest one.
And indeed, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron all have two new fabs each in the pipeline scheduled to come online this year through 2028. The Micron and SK Hynix fabs will both be dedicated to producing memory. As for Samsung (which has a lot of fingers in a lot of semiconductor pies), I would guess their newest South Korean fab will be dedicated to memory, while their 4-5nm Taylor, Texas fab will not. Building new fabs are not the actions of monopolists who want to artificially constrain supply.
Indeed, the “they’re artificially constraining supply” nonsense suggests that they’re producing fewer memory chip than they could otherwise, and that’s just not how the industry works. Fab production lines run 24/7/365 (indeed, they pay technicians triple to work Christmas), because every hour a modern fab is down they’re losing millions in lost profit.
Building new fabs is still a risky bet, because the industry is extremely cyclical. No matter how furious the boom now, the next bust is always around the corner. Back when I was working at Applied Materials, the cycle was described as trains linked together with slinkys. First software takes off, then hardware gets yanked along, then the chip manufacturers get yanked, and then, finally, semiconductor equipment manufacturers get yanked into motion, and shortly after that happens, the bust hits the front of the train, and the trailing cars all crash into each other. (The standing joke at Applied Materials was that you could tell the bust was on the very moment the company broke ground on a new manufacturing facility.) Build a new $25 billion fab at the wrong part of the cycle and it could take a company much longer to amortize it than they expected. That’s why so many companies switched to the foundry model.
Speaking of foundries, could they be a solution to the memory crunch? Potentially, but there you’re running into the same AI boom-induced wafer start constraints that plague the memory sector. TSMC is fabbing AI chips for Nvidia (and most of its competitors) as fast as it possibly can. Maybe they can profitably book runs on slightly older (but not “mature”) TSMC fabs, but they’re still competing with every other fabless company supporting the AI build-out for the same wafer starts. A whole lot of different silicon goes into a data center.
Could an existing semiconductor manufacturer jump into the existing space? Yes, and in fact Intel has announced plans to do just that, though evidently with their own proprietary, next gen “Z-Angle Memory (ZAM),” which isn’t going to do squat to relieve this year’s DDR3/4/5 shortage. Still, they have enough slightly trailing edge fabs to do it, though Intel has had trouble executing at speed in the past.
Could another company jump into the semiconductor fab race as an integrated device manufacturer for memory? Risky but possible. Someone like Apple could decide that memory shortages are an existential threat to its business model and spend the tens of billions to get into the game. And indeed, Apple is already spending some $500 billion to reshore its supply chain back into the US, so that would fit right in. Apple could potentially contract with TSMC (or even Micron) to build and run a memory fab. (Samsung is a trickier proposition, since the two are fierce competitors as the biggest smartphone manufacturers in the world, but there’s still a lot of “cooperatition” between the two, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.) But the three year lead time still applies.
Entire tech boom and bust cycles have come and gone in an era in which RAM is cheap and plentiful, a situation people have come to think of as “normal.” Just as with higher credit rates, a whole lot of business models that were viable in an era of cheap memory are suddenly going to stop being so in an era of scarcity. Some companies will be able to raise prices and remain profitable, and others won’t. Not everyone will be hit, as a lot of embedded devices use older types of memory that hasn’t gone through the roof. There are all sorts of older fabs churning out older types of memory that aren’t relevant to this discussion.
The idea that Samsung and SK Hynix are colluding is particularly laughable, as the two Korean chaebol backing SK Hynix (Hyundai and LG (AKA Lucky Goldstar)) both hate rival Samsung with a passion.
The current shortage, as painful as it is to so many, isn’t the result of a nefarious cartel, it’s just the free market working like it always does at the interface between supply and demand. It’s just that cutting-edge semiconductor supply has a whole lot more lead-time constraints that most other economic sectors.
The AI Bubble seems considerably worse than the Dotcom Bubble (which was only partially about the Internet; updating hardware and software to avoid the Y2K bug also drove a lot of spending in the same timeframe), and its inevitable bursting (or just deflating) is going to relieve pressure on everyone else that needs 10nm or smaller wafer starts.
Babylon Bee: “We Asked AI To Simulate If The U.S. Had A Second Civil War.”
Here are the results:
“In the city, we’re used to being able to burn down a target and no one does anything. I guess it’s different in the suburbs, though.”
“One of the big issues is how we hate guns. But the right loves them. I guess none of us considered how big a disadvantage that would put us in a civil war.”
“Many of the losing combatants fled to the far north. Starvation was rampant among them from lack of access to DoorDash.”
