For your feel-good Saturday video, Daily Dose of Internet has complied a video of the dumbest criminal of the decade (or at least those caught on camera).
The guy who thought he could escape from the police while also towing his mobile home is an all-time classic.
A hotel in El Paso and its owner face a temporary injunction and restraining order from the El Paso County Attorney for alleged criminal activity and suspicions of housing Tren de Aragua gang members.
El Paso County Attorney Christina Sanchez filed an original petition for abatement of a common nuisance, an application for a temporary restraining order, a temporary injunction, and a permanent injunction against the Gateway Hotel.
“The Gateway Hotel’s reputation is as a business that does not properly document the guests that stay at the hotel, has narcotics trafficking, disorderly conduct, and violent crime,” read the lawsuit.
The first documented instance of a possible gang member was in June when police were called after a suspect shot a handgun in the air and made threats of violence.
Police later noted tattoos consistent with the gang Tren de Aragua on inhabitants of the hotel on several occasions while investigating calls of disorderly conduct and fire code violations.
In addition to criminal activity, the hotel has operated without a valid certificate of occupancy for the past six years and has failed three inspections by the El Paso Fire Department. The fire department noted holes in walls and ceilings throughout the entire building and sprinkler heads taped over.
One video cited in the suit shows individuals “partying” on the third floor with one gun being shot, men holding knives, and another holding a hatchet he allegedly used to assault individuals and cause damage to the hotel.
Additional police calls to the Gateway Hotel include failures to comply with sex offender registration, theft, aggravated assault, and narcotics—including marijuana and methamphetamines.
“Management does not attempt ‘to control the conduct of the guests and is negligently allowing gang activity to infiltrate the area,’” remarked a police officer in the suit.
Here’s a local media video:
“The El Paso County Attorney [is] filing a lawsuit for a temporary and permanent injunction against the hotel.”
There have been 700 police calls to the hotel in the last two years.
The hotel failed at least three inspections by the El Paso fire department.
The Biden Administration’s insistence on flooding the country with illegal aliens is the gift that keeps on giving. And Kamala Harris’ support for an illegal alien amnesty will insure that all the rapists, felons, thugs and murderers they brought in get to stay permanently.
One year ago, the Kerch Strait Bridge was hit for the second time, following the October 2022 attack. Russians tried to repair that damage, but the results seem to be…subpar.
👀💥 Kerch Bridge: As a result of the damage received, the structural elements of the bridge are degrading, which leads to the crumbling of its individual parts, – ATESH pic.twitter.com/99WgC1HaYX
I’m not an expert in bridge structural integrity, but that warping/sagging/bending doesn’t look good. In a video game, that looks like a structure you’d get once chance to jump off of before it collapses into the sea.
The Kerch Bridge, a strategically vital structure used by Russia to connect with occupied Crimea, is in need of urgent repairs and cannot survive structural damage, according to a Crimean-based pro-Ukrainian group.
“The Kerch Bridge is living its final days,” Atesh, a pro-Kyiv military partisan group of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, said in a post on Telegram on Sunday.
A partisan source, so take it with a grain of salt.
Denys Davydov covers the bridge damage in the first minute of this video:
“The Crimean Bridge looks very tired.”
“Those images appeared in Internet yesterday. Indeed, you may see some of the damages towards the railway part of the bridge. Which is quite strange, because there were no recent strikes reported. It means that this part of the construction wasn’t repaired properly after the first strike on the bridge.”
“You may say that those are just minor damages, and the bridge can still work. Yes, it works, but there is the feature which tells us that the bridge now has the limited capabilities for the transfer of the heavy cargo, and the structural damage of the bridge could be much more severe than we see just visually on those pictures.”
“So the clue that the bridge is not OK for the heavy cargo lies with this ferry, which Ukraine kaboomed around three weeks ago. Russia used this ferry to transfer the oil products, but somehow didn’t use the Kerch bridge. And with the new pictures that appeared on the Internet, we may understand that the bridge is not in a good shape.”
“So indeed, the Ukrainian attack on the Russian ferry fleet was a main destruction of the Russian supplies towards Crimea and the southern part of Ukraine, which is now partially occupied by the Russian Federation.”
From the limited information we have to go on, this analysis seems correct.
It can be hard to determine the truth of things coming out of a warzone, even with Russia’s notoriously poor operational security. But absent photo manipulation (which we can’t rule out without more firsthand evidence), it does appear that that the Kerch Strait Bridge is clearly slumping and may even be unusable, which will severely complicate Russian logistics in southern Ukraine.
Yesterday’s LinkSwarm talked about Venezuelan gangs ripping off Permian Basin oilfields, but that was hardly the only activity by the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang to make the news this week. That gang evidently took over at least one Aurora, Colorado apartment complex:
“The evidence we have reviewed indicates that gang members are engaging in flagrant trespass violations, assaults and battery, human traffic trafficking, sexual abuse of minors, unlawful firearms possession, extortion and other criminal activities.” Human trafficking? Where’s that “see something say something?” And sexual abuse or minors recalls the Rotherham Muslim rape gang scandal in the UK. Evidently “raping children” is just one of those jobs natives won’t do.
“According to the law firm’s report, the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has threatened to kill and, in certain instances, has apparently actively attempted to kill, members of Whispering Pines management.” Is “attempted murder” just not a serious enough charge for the police to get involved?
“A consultant for the property management company was severely beaten and stomped by gang members and was hospitalized the alleged incident recorded by building cameras with screenshots attached to the letter.” I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the property management company in question were derelict in their fundamental duties.
“The takeover began last November.” So this has been going on for over three-quarters of a year. Again, where were the police?
“The report recounts that this summer, the gang approached the property manager and told him they would help him out in exchange for half of all the rent that he collected.”
“The gang members then allegedly took over vacant apartments, and according to the document, moved families into those units and started collecting rent.”
The gang obviously didn’t fear property management or the police.
Here’s footage of that same gang operating openly in another apartment complex called The Edge:
Another video, which I am unable to relocate right now, showed a reporter on a street near an apartment complex where gangs had left stolen and stripped cars all down the sides of the street.
The question is how was the problem allowed to get so bad? How was the problem allowed to fester more that nine months?
In increasingly Democrat-controlled Colorado, are the police being told not to arrest illegal alien gang members?
I wasn’t planning on doing another Ukraine drone piece so soon after my Martian war machine post, but these new Ukrainian ground drones are pretty interesting.
The video covers three new remote platforms:
“The Termite, or termit, which stands for Track Modular Infantry Transporter, has a 300kg payload. It can carry a single casualty, or be sent with a controller so a casualty can self steer him or herself, and a more seriously injured colleague away from danger. Its modular design means it can also deliver military kit and carry offensive weapons. With a 20-hour power pack, it has front and rear cameras and night vision.”
Next: The Shablya combat platform, which is a remote control turret. “Its 7.62mm machine gun can destroy enemy armored vehicles and UAVS.” UAVS, sure, but it would have to be a very lightly armored vehicle for 7.62 to penetrate. “Easily hidden, it can also be attached to the Termite. It can be controlled from a shelter or via Wi-Fi, and it can store targets and reposition at the push of a button. It needs three boxes of 200 rounds but the barrel needs changing every 600.” The form factor is pretty striking, looking like something out of a video game. Or maybe a Vektor CR-21. And indeed, automatic versions of turrets like this have been a staple of various video games for some time.
Last is the Lyut or Fury, a four-wheeled remote-operated 7.62mm machine gun platform.
All these are interesting bits of kit that are probably well-suited to the Ukrainian battlefield, but all probably superfluous to, say, U.S. military needs. The Termite is probably 1/50th the cost (or less) than the army’s robotic mule, but its slow speed means it’s probably unsuited for evacuating wounded troops or near-front logistics resupply for an army as focused on maneuver warfare as the U.S., and unlike the robotic mule is probably unsuited to rough terrain. U.S. forces would probably use helicopters or any number of IFVs for those roles. Likewise, I don’t see much of a role for the wheeled gun platform for much the same reasons (though from time to time you read about Uncle Sam testing broadly similar remote vehicles for roles like remote demolition).
I can see more uses for the remote turrets as an area-denial weapon for certain situations, such setting up a dozen or so around bivouac perimeters with one guy monitoring the video feed. Knowing America’s modern weapon procurement trends, they would probably try to include an autonomous mode, which would do great right up until it fragged friendly troops or some kid tending sheep…
Russian soldiers in a Horsell Common Zaporizhia treeline got a very unpleasant surprise when a new Ukrainian drone unleashed a rain of fiery thermite death on them.
Leave it to the Ukrainians to make yet another terrifying innovation in drone warfare. I’m sure the Russian soldiers were none too thrilled to be targeted by this drone-based Martian heat ray. Thermite is easy to come by, being just powdered aluminum and rust, and burns at an infernal 4,000°F. But I do wonder how they’ve rigged it so that it does its Sparkler Rain of Death trick without catching fire itself. I suspect some sort of pressurized nozzle with a separate igniter.
I suspect this will prove a very effective tool at clearing trenches.
Now for a Brucie Bonus (as Suchomimus likes to say, based on a British game show), here’s the post title reference.
I’ve had several videos cluttering up my tabs, none of which I thought worthy of doing a separate post on, so I’m going to burn all of them off here. Think of it like a sampler plate at a restaurant.
Habitual Linecrosser lays out just how much more powerful the U.S. military is than China. It’s not remotely a fair fight…
From the RNC, why Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson left the Democratic Party to join the Republicans:
“Democrats in power demonstrate they don’t care about stopping the killers or the thieves who terrorize black and brown communities. They don’t care about securing our border, and they don’t care about dangerous homeless encampments. No, the heart of today’s woke Democrat Party is with the criminals, not with their victims.”
From across the pond, why the Labour Party loathes the actual working class:
As here, lefting wing activists want to talk about global warming, gay rights and illegal alien rights, while the actual working class wants to talk about boring old things like “jobs” and “crime.” “There’s a large swath of the Labour Party who feel complete and absolute contempt for white working class people in particular.”
It’s not just the UK: How luxury beliefs are failing all across Europe:
“Only a few years ago, every academic under the sun was telling us that we were going to have a green surge in European politics, largely because most academics support the greens or radical left movements. So they were very support of what was happening. It was quite obvious that this was going to end in election disaster because the policies that many green parties have been bringing forward are not realistically anchored in the life experiences of ordinary voters.”
Also:
“At the core of all of these parties is the immigration population nexus. That is what ultimately this is all about. The more immigration the better, these parties will do that.”
How the EU is killing Europe:
Europe used to thrive on innovation because of different competing nation statues. Now a Mandarin Ming class has taken over and stiffed that. “Europe has failed to produce any significant innovation in the last 30 years.”
How a 1995 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 eerily predicted the actual future of San Francisco in 2024.
Enjoy your sampler platter, and please tip your waitress…
“All the conspiracy theories come out around it, too. I don’t know what to believe. I do know is that if our government tried to do an assassination attempt, that’s kind of how it would look. It was very inefficient. That was the DMV of assassination attempts. That was not good. They had a very small budget.”
“You could tell they they wanted to do it with a grassy knoll at a parade like they were used. ‘We can’t swing, that we’ve got to do a tin roof at a town fair, that’s all we’ve got.'”
“‘Can’t get any ex-military people to take the shot. Let’s get the kid who came in last place on his marksman team.'”
“Dude, that was just one big government block of cheese.”
“I was hoping Trump was going to come out the same day, you’re still bleeding to do the press conference. ‘They tried to shoot me, they were too slow and I’m too fast. I dodged the bullet. I saw it coming from so far away, it was like the Matrix, it was all in slow motion. Call me Neo, I’m the chosen one.'”
“‘They say he was a republican, the shooter, but I’ll tell you right, now he shoots like a liberal. Not straight, so not straight.'”
“‘They said it was a fake bullet, that’s what they said. It was a real bullet. We found the bullets. Turns out the bullets, they were made in China, that’s where they were made. They were little teeny tiny Chinese bullets, so small, so tiny.'”
On Patrick Bet-David’s podcast, mugged liberal evolutionary psychologist Bret Weinstein calls the modern Democratic Party “an existential threat to the republic” and says the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsement has him willing to vote for Trump.
It starts with a clip of RFK, Jr. denouncing the DNC and the mainstream media (“They [his relatives and old school Democrats] would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who like Vice President Harris has not appeared in a single interview or an unscripted encounter with voters for 35 days”) only to have CNN fade out the audio.
Patrick Bet-David: “The moment he’s about to criticize Kamala they do this.”
Bret Weinstein: “It was classic Robert F Kennedy, Jr. You know, he has encyclopedic knowledge on a wide range of subjects and he covered a great many of them.”
BW: “What he was effectively saying was that the presentation that we all receive is pure stagecraft, and he’s right. And then to have CNN cut away, not able to engage in their usual level of stagecraft, because they don’t know what he’s going to say, is incredible. They validated exactly what it was he was describing, which was a fake world that’s presented over our screens by these mega monolith corporations that decide what we get to know and when we get to know it.”
PBD: “At the RNC, the name Joe Biden was mentioned two times during the entire convention, but at the DNC, Trump was mentioned 400 times, not because of policies, just trashing him.”
BW: “I think [RFK, Jr’s endorsement of Trump] absolutely monumental, because I think there is we are in a novel moment in American political history, where many of us who hold different positions on the political spectrum have different priorities with respect to policy are finding that none of our differences matter in light of the jeopardy that the that the republic is in.”
BW:”[RFK, Jr] is emboldening a movement that is more widely recognizing that those differences have to be put aside until the main job is done.”
BW: “I was very interested in the way he navigated the idea this was not a simple endorsement of Trump, this was an endorsement of retaking the White House and using that position to restore the republic to its proper course.”
BW: “The DNC and its media organs engineered a surge of popularity for Vice President Harris based upon, oh, nothing. No policies. No interviews, no debates, only smoke and mirrors and balloons in a highly produced Chicago circus.”
BW: [On whether RFK’s support makes him consider voting for Trump] “Oh, absolutely. Let me just be perfectly clear about that. I think the modern Democratic Party is an existential threat to the republic.”
BW: “Although I am a Democrat, I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, the party that I see in front of me today is literally the inverse of the party I signed up for. This is now the party of war, this is the party of racism, this is the party of censorship. I don’t recognize this party. There is no conceivable scenario in which I would vote for Kamala Harris.”
BW: “I am open to voting for Trump. I’m especially open to it if he is partnered with Bobby Kennedy, because what that tells me is that my values, which are a much closer match for Bobby’s, are represented in that Administration, and that’s really what I want.”
BW: “I want a coalition to redefine American politics, because, frankly, we have a long-standing problem with corruption, which has now turned into something else with with the modern Democratic Party.”
BW: “We need to rethink the way we govern ourselves, so that corruption is not the dominant force, and a coalition is the way we’re going to do that.”
The interview is interesting for several reasons:
Weinstein is dead on about the corruption and totalitarian tendencies of the modern Democratic Party. Indeed, if you removed the corruption and social justice from the Democratic Party, I doubt there’s anything left.
The appeal of RFK, Jr. continues to elude me, seeming a mishmash of ecowhackjobism, pre-social justice liberal nostrums and healthy serving of conspiracy theories. He receives outsized media attention for a man who’s never held elected office. But Weinstein is hardly an unlearned rube dazzled by the faded ghost of Camelot. Clearly the cadres of disaffected old-school liberals and soft-left squishy independents who feel deeply alienated from the modern Democratic Party is bigger than I thought it was, and Kennedy and former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard seem to have become the totems for this group.
That both Kennedy and Gabbard have endorsed Trump may be more significant than I thought at first. In the wake of the Twitter files and other revelations about just how badly the Democratic Media Complex has deceived people on a wide range of issues, I think many in this group have come to the realization that their Trump Derangement Syndrome is a false worldview imposed on them by systemic preference falsification, and have gradually come to regard Trump as the lesser evil compared to the endemic corruption and disasterous policies of the modern Democratic Party. I think many in this group see the Kennedy and Gabbard endorsements as giving them permission to vote for Trump, a sort of Get Out of Liberal Guilt Free card. Clearly Kennedy isn’t doing it for the money. “If Bobby’s endorsed him, how bad can he be?”
Even if Kennedy only brings over 3% of voters, that could be a huge swing in November.
YouTuber GameWatcher has supplied a side-by-side timelapse of Russia’s fairly minimal gains in its respective offensive push.
“This animation is made from a collection of static analyst maps and represents my interpretation of the movements of armies and frontlines. Therefore, it should be viewed as an approximation rather than an exact depiction. The numbers represent the aproximate [sic] troops count for both sides.”