With the widespread advent of drone warfare, a whole lot of air defense doctrine needs to be rewritten. Ground-To-Air interceptor missiles that were cost-effective for multi-million fighter planes aren’t for thousands upon thousands of cheap drones, some of which cost less than $1,000 a pop. Cheap kinetic kill shells, AKA “ack-ack,” the mainstay of World War II, are making a comeback in a big way.
“This is the [Rheinmetall] Skyranger, a new unmanned weapon that blasts 30 mm rounds at a facemelting 1,200 rounds per minute.”
“Germany just ordered 600 of these bad boys for the total price of €9 billion, roughly $10.4 billion.”
“The plan for these is to be slapped on to their new boxer vehicles.” In fact, Skyranger the weapons platform is independent of the chassis it rides on. You can theoretically mount it on any modern BMP or tank chassis.
“Also it’s not just the gun. It’s a series of four optionally manned air defense systems you can slap onto any vehicle that can handle the weight and includes a dedicated radar platform. Two designed to fire missiles and one with the big gun on top.”
The gun comes in 30mm and 35mm flavors, to match whatever ammo the purchasing army is using.
“These are classified as SHORAD platforms, or short-ranged air defense.”
“While things like Patriot batteries are designed to be stationary long range assets, the idea behind Skyrangers and other SHORADs is that they’re integrated with maneuver formations. So while tanks and infantry push forward, these will hang back a bit and create a nice little defensive bubble in the airspace for the fighty boys to work under.”
Discussion of rotary cannon vs. rotary barrel cannon snipped. But single barrel cannons make it much easier to program burst modes on the rounds right before they exit the cannon.
“The gun itself has a max range of 3,000m, a little short of 2 miles.” With coverage extended with the missile-firing turrets, which can use a variety of munitions, “everything from old Stingers to future ones like the Sky Knight missile.”
“There are two different kinds of rounds currently used in the 30 mm version. The PMC 308, which is the same air burst round used on the Puma IFV, and the newer PMC 455, which manages to nearly quadruple the number of tungsten projectiles and the same round can carry for the same weight by making it smaller.” More projectiles mean a better chance of a kill for a small target like a drone.
“Because the turrets are unmanned, it means it doesn’t take any space up in the actual hull of the vehicle, which means big or small, you can slap that shit on anything.”
I’m going to skip over the “cold start” vertically-launched anti-tank missile system covered at the end (fascinating though that technology is) as off-topic for this particular post.
“According to all accounts, so far for the German Flakpanzer Gepards that were donated, they’ve been performing pretty decently in Ukraine, targeting both small and large drones on top of slower moving cruise missiles.”
Speaking of Gepards, Suchomimus has impressive footage of a Gepard actually taking out a Shahed drone:
The Gepards are just shy of a half century in service, and were actually retired by Germany before being hauled back out and shipped off to Ukraine, where they seem to be doing solid work, there just aren’t enough to cover the wide the vast expanse of airspace the war encompasses.
In a modern world deeply interconnected by global trade, it’s pretty rare that a country will just up and seize a company belonging to another country, but that’s just what The Netherlands did.
The Dutch government has taken control of Nexperia, a Chinese-owned chipmaker based in the Netherlands, in a bid to safeguard the European supply of semiconductors for cars and other electronic goods and protect Europe’s economic security.
The Hague said it took the decision due to “serious governance shortcomings” and to prevent the chips from becoming unavailable in an emergency.
Nexperia’s owner Wingtech said on Monday that it would take actions to protect its rights and would seek government support.
The development threatens to raise tensions between the European Union and China, which have increased in recent months over trade and Beijing’s relationship with Russia.
In December 2024, the US government placed Wingtech on its so-called “entity list”, identifying the company as a national security concern.
Under the regulations, US companies are barred from exporting American-made goods to businesses on the list unless they have special approval.
In the UK, Nexperia was forced to sell its silicon chip plant in Newport, after MPs and ministers expressed national security concerns. It currently owns a UK facility in Stockport.
Nexperia was spun off from NXP, which was spun off from Philips. They’re integrated device manufacturers, but not anywhere near the high-end devices fabbed by TSMC, Intel or Samsung. Quite the opposite. Nexperia specializes in discretes, the cheap, mass-produced individual electronic components (transistors, diodes, MOSFETs) that are on the very bottom rung of semiconductor manufacturing: High volume, low margin operations for extremely cheap, simple chips that still under-gird just about every electronic product made.
That Stockport (greater Manchester) fab was built in 1987, which is so many semiconductor generations ago I can’t even count. The only Nexperia fab left is in Hamburg, which is shown as being built in 1953, but since they’re running 200mm wafers, it was probably last upgraded in the 1990s, and supposedly turns out “100 billion devices per year.” Semiconductor fabs that turn out discretes are informally called “jelly bean factories,” and earn low but reliable profits.
The Dutch Economic Ministry said it made the “highly exceptional” decision to invoke the Goods Availability Act over “acute signals of serious governance shortcomings” within Nexperia.
“These signals posed a threat to the continuity and safeguarding on Dutch and European soil of crucial technological knowledge and capabilities,” the ministry said in a statement.
“Losing these capabilities could pose a risk to Dutch and European economic security.”
The statement did not detail why it thought the firm’s operations were risky. A spokesperson for the minister of economic affairs told the BBC there was no further information to share.
The measures are aimed to keep European chip supplies flowing and protect Dutch intellectual property, said EU-China researcher Sacha Courtial.
In a crisis, a Chinese-owned company could come under pressure from Beijing to halt supplies or prioritise sales to China, crippling European industries like carmakers and electronics manufacturers, he said.
The Hague’s move puts economic security “over free-market investment principles”, in what could pave the way for other governments to follow, said Mr Courtial from the Jacques Delors Institute.
The China Semiconductor Industry Association said on Tuesday that it is “seriously concerned” about the Dutch government taking control of Nexperia.
The group described the measures as “selective and discriminatory” against overseas branches of Chinese enterprises and undermine open trade.
The Dutch court document said records from a June 12 meeting between U.S. Commerce Department officials and the Dutch Foreign Ministry showed rising pressure to remove Nexperia’s Chinese CEO to help keep the company off the list.
“The fact that the company’s CEO is still the same Chinese owner is problematic,” the filing said, citing minutes from the Dutch-U.S. meeting. “It is almost certain the CEO will have to be replaced to qualify for the exemption from the entity list.”
Nexperia is caught between the U.S. and China, with U.S. President Donald Trump ratcheting up pressure on tech as part of a broader trade war in which he threatened 100% tariffs on China’s exports last week. Beijing has announced curbs on exports of rare earths.
Nexperia faces export restrictions from both governments, it said on Tuesday, and is seeking talks. It said a new interim CEO had been put in place after the former chief executive Zhang Xuezheng was removed from his post on a Dutch court order.
The documents released on Tuesday by the Amsterdam Commercial Court showed that Nexperia had been informed by the Dutch Economic Affairs Ministry on June 5 that the new U.S. rule might be coming and it should take action. “It was clear to all involved that (a U.S. listing) could have a significant negative impact on Nexperia and its business,” it said.
The fact the Dutch government so readily acceded to U.S. requests suggests that the case against Nexperia was pretty substantial, and the specter of possibly open conflict with an increasingly bellicose Russia may have played a factor in their decision making. Nailing down key supply chain components, no matter how lowly, is both far-sighted and suggests there’s more to this situation than meets the eye.
Also, it may be that Euroelites are simply tired of both Russia and China’s lawless shenanigans…
I was struck with this post by Penny Arcade’s Tyco, AKA Jerry Holkins.
I don’t understand why I thought that more information would be better. I think it’s just because I like information. To be fair, though, I couldn’t have imagined what it would actually look like. Coming from a religious environment of High Control I imagined that shattering that status would necessarily have a liberatory payload, as it had for me. I try not to feel too bad. In the prescient Neuromancer, William Gibson could imagine a digital world parallel to our own, one in which you could be functionally embodied, live, and die, but couldn’t imagine that something could be wireless. And he’s way smarter than me.
Because I’ve been sick, and spending an inordinate time in fever spikes until the Advil kicks in, I’ve had the “opportunity” to spend a lot of time in bed on TikTok. I don’t think it’s possible to understand your children at all if you don’t have some knowledge of it. Cultural shift is in some ways a function of baud rate, which has never been higher, if you’re wondering why you feel old at twenty-eight. Noone has ever lived like this and it’s not clear that they should.
TikTok is a litter box of misinformation; even the clean litter is made questionable simply as a fact of its adjacency. Here are just a few of the notions I’ve been presented with the last couple days, and not just once, but multiple times:
– There is conclusive proof that interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is a spacecraft
– There are modern instances of human parthenogenesis, or “virgin birth”
– Pranks where young women generate photorealistic images of men entering their dorms and houses and send them to their parents asking “what should I do”
– It is safe for orangutans and other wilderness beasts to jump on backyard trampolines, and they do so frequently
– Model-generated content of virtually every stripe that would would fool a hundred percent of anyone even five seconds older than me
The amount of AI material on TikTok broadly is just insane, the most obvious examples of which are Jesus Christ bedeviled by… well, the Devil, coupled with a suggestion to like and subscribe to help “our savior.” I’m not a hundred percent sure it works like that. But AI is often just grabbing other people’s videos and altering them slightly and then posting them to accounts whose names look like the kind of password a password manager would automagically generate. The idea I think is that you simply have to be more human to stand out and defeat these machines, like John Henry. Maybe that would make sense in a world not governed by algorithmic feeds, where people chose what they were watching, but we often don’t. Also, John Henry dies at the end of that story.
Gen X is the equivalent of pre-war steel. I’m not implying a particular moral valence, or establishing a hierarchy of moral purity; the thing that largely defines my cadre is that we’ve always resisted the term anyway. We are as subject to propaganda as any human being; we take plus two from flank attacks like everybody else. But having a formed identity prior to the ambient radiation of social media is like having been administered a vaccine they don’t make anymore. Because they can’t.
Bold added.
All worth thinking about, but it’s the last that hits hardest. In the first huge burst of the Internet in the mid-1990s, early adopters talked about “drinking from the firehose” as the torrent of information and connectivity it provided. And that was mostly text-based information.
Today’s Gen Alpha kids live in that firehose.
Every generation changes based on the most powerful information and communication mediums of their day, as Baby Boomers weened on TV, telephones and rock and roll can attest. But it’s not just the content, it’s the speed with which this unstoppable Mississippi of information is being poured into youthful heads. A few years ago, back when I could occasionally afford having a maid come over to clean my house before July 4th or New Year’s Eve, one of them brought their young daughter with them. While their mother cleaned, she sat there endlessly scrolling Tik-Tok videos, one after another in quick succession.
I remember when someone wrote it was impossible to completely scan cable TV stations for something to watch, and started out by saying “Assuming you spend 4 seconds on each channel,” and I went “Who the hell spends that much time? I can do that in a second or less per station.” I suspect saying kids doom-scrolling Tik-Tok videos spend a second or less on each one probably dramatically understates how quickly they scroll past anything that fails to engage their mayfly gaze. Remember when critics said MTV would destroy attention spans? Today’s kids probably regard four minutes to wait for the next video as an excruciating, Masterpiece Theater level of slowness.
If you dropped today’s teenagers into the wilderness with maps and compasses, could they find their way out or would they be helpless without their smart phones to guide them? Can they apply critical thinking skills, or is the first answer ChatGPT hands them always the “right” answer in their minds?
Of course I also remember when some evangelicals claimed Dungeons & Dragons would turn you into Satan worshipers. Didn’t seem to happen to my generation, but now there are actual Satanic tranny death cults, so maybe somebody owes the shade of Jack Chick an apology.
And all this rewiring of children’s brains was already happening before the arrival of widespread commercial AI. And that Pandora’s Box is bringing with a whole host of unforeseen problems, including chatbots allegedly pushing teens to commit suicide.
In science fiction of the 1980s and 90s, AIs were a key component of a theorized technological singularity. Simply put, the singularity is the point in human history in which technological innovation goes vertical, beyond which the outcome is impossible to predict. World Wars I and II were both singularity events, in which human history would be forever altered and for which no one could foresee the new shape of the world before the event.
I’m pretty sure we’re in the midst of such a singularity right now.
We thought AI was going to do things like achieve engineering breakthroughs and create more nutritious crops with which to feed the world. Instead AI hallucinations seem to be creating new ways to lie to people, with more weirdly elaborate lies than ever before, like the guy who ChatGPT convinced had discovered a new breakthrough in physics, but it was all delusional crap.
The joke is a company announcing “We can finally create the Torment Nexus from the classic science fiction novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”
But it seems that the combination of social media plus AI is creating vast warrens of individual Torment Nexi rabbit holes. And AI coming of age at the same time that the woke mind virus was was running rampant made everything immeasurably worse.
No one set out to create the Torment Nexus, it just popped out as an emergent property of cramming all human knowledge into Tessier-Ashpool’s white hot data cores. It used to be that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions, but now we’re told that the road to Heaven just naturally passes through the Torment Nexus. Just ignore the stinging radioactive flames as you make your way to paradise.
It just turns out that the Torment Nexus is the singularity’s default setting.
This is an interesting video of a Miltech conference in Ukraine, which includes a lot of the drones we’ve talked about here, as well as some things we haven’t seen yet.
There’s a wide range of people interviewed here:
“We’re back in Lviv at the second Ukrainian Defense Tech Valley Summit.”
“Judging by this massive unmanned submarine, Ukraine’s defense tech has grown a lot.”
One thing shown is the “RATEL-M logistical case evac UGV,” a remote controlled ground vehicle for logistics and casualty evacuation.
A Fire Point rep talks about the FP-1, “the most used Ukraine deep strike drone by amount and by effectiveness as well. FP-1 is responsible for around 60-65% of the deep strike missions that are currently happening on the front line, and it’s also the cheapest one.”
She also shows off a miniature copy of the Flamingo cruise missile so much in the news this year. “This is our way to deliver big payloads on even deeper distances in a very asymmetric way in returns of price to effectiveness, because this missile costs less than $1 million and is the biggest in the world by payload capacity, and by the distance.”
Ukrainian solder attending the conference: “I believe it’s the good platform to find industrial and manufacturers who create the best products that servicemen like me and my fellow brothers in arms can use on the battlefield.”
“It’s the second edition of defense tech by Brave 1. We had the first one in October 2024. This time we are four times bigger. We have representatives from more than 50 countries. More than 200 companies represent their solutions and we also have more than 300 investors from many countries around the globe.”
“More than $100 million to be invested in the Ukrainian defense ecosystem.”
“One of the brave one ecosystem companies, they raised $16 million in private investment from US and European investors.” Last conference the largest investment was $2.9 million.
STARK UK (not the Tony kind) rep: “We’re a German company with a Ukraine arm. So, we do all our operational testing and R&D in Ukraine. But we also bring the benefits of those systems back to the UK, back to Germany, to the European NATO market.”
“Roma dreamed of taking out one tank, at least one. Now he has personally destroyed 500 enemy vehicles.”
“Our mission is to bring international capital into Ukraine’s domestic defense industry, to get the Russians out and to help integrate Ukraine into Europe’s security architecture.”
There’s some coverage of United24, the Ukrainian initiative whose YouTube channel this is on.
There’s some talk about AI controlled air defense turrets called Sky Sentinel, with prototypes of the system on display. “We’re trying to get multiple ones of these all across cities.”
“Only in Ukraine do you have almost no distance between the technologist, the factory and the war fighter. So the feedback loop is continuous. There’s no Pentagon separating them. There’s no MOD separating them.”
The video provides a glimpse of a Ukrainian defense industry operating under tech startup rules: Move fast, break things, and rapidly iterate through quick prototypes. While that’s probably not the right approach to build, say, a stealth bomber or an aircraft carrier, it’s probably much better for quickly deploying new technology to the field in response to enemy action.
The U.S. Department of Defense weapon procurement system operates more like the IBM of old: Methodical, through, bureaucratic and slow. For the newly rechristened U.S. Department of War to win future wars, we’re going to need less IBM and more tech startup speed to defeat our foes.
A whole lot of despicable Democrats voted against remembering Charlie Kirk and denouncing political violence, a whole bunch of lefties are still lying about Kirk, Comey indicted, President Trump officially backs a complete Ukraine victory, a new American stealth fighter enters production, two murderous lefty scumbags die, and an infamous thirty-four year old Austin murder mystery is solved.
“The ‘Study’ You’re Citing About Right-Wing Violence Is Full Of Fake Data.”
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week, conservatives noted that most political violence comes from the left. The left bristles at this fact and has responded by dramatically padding the numbers to pretend the reverse is true.
Consider a Sept. 12 piece from The Economist claiming, “extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”
Right up front, the piece admits it used data “largely compiled by researchers whom sceptical (sic) conservatives would probably dismiss as biased.” The disclaimer is meant to inoculate The Economist’s audience to its sloppy reporting, as if challenges from conservatives will somehow prove The Economist’s accuracy.
Yes, readers should be beyond skeptical of the source in that piece, The Prosecution Project. Its website claims to “track[] and provid[e] analysis of felony criminal cases involving illegal political violence, terrorism, and extremism occurring in the United States since 1990.”
The founder and executive director of the Prosecution Project is Michael Loadenthal, although the links naming the website’s leadership were broken Friday, meaning no names were visible. Google had not yet scrubbed Loadenthal’s name from searches.
Loadenthal is an “openly anarchist Antifa-affiliated … researcher at the University of Cincinnati who, by his own admission, is a far-left violent extremist,” The Federalist reported in 2023.
So we have an Antifa-connected researcher with rabid bias against the right, held out as an expert on deciding who is extreme. It is like using a vegetarian to define which meat eaters are the most humane — none of them, says the vegetarian.
The Prosecution Project lists January 2024 charges against John Reardon of Massachusetts, who made antisemitic threats against synagogues and the Israeli Consulate. It notes, “Influenced by events in Gaza, he also said, ‘you do realize that by supporting genocide that means it’s ok for people to commit genocide against you.’” The Department of Justice never identified Reardon’s political affiliation, but The Prosecution Project’s own account seems to indicate he was a pro-Palestine fanatic, a cause typically associated with Democrats. Yet The Prosecution Project identifies Reardon’s crimes as “rightist” because they’re “identity-focused.”
The group also lists 2022 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act charges against Edmee Chavannes — even though “Chavannes was found not guilty.”
The Prosecution Project even includes the posting of racist stickers in its tracker, as if that’s comparable to terrorism or violence. One wonders if the group will treat Democrats’ desecration of Charlie Kirk memorials with the same seriousness.
Most crimes involving race or abortion businesses are blamed on the right in the data, with nothing to back up those claims. Yet these issues and others often cross over to the left. The Federalist has reported on the progressive anti-abortion movement, for example, and the left’s Marxist oppressor-versus-oppressed framework is manifestly racist.
Comb through the ridiculous data on The Prosecution Project’s website, and you will soon conclude it is worthless to everyone except leftist propagandists trying to downplay Charlie Kirk’s murder and flip the blame for violence in the U.S. to the right.
Similarly, a biased “study” by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute was debunked this week by Amber Duke at The Daily Caller.
Nowrasteh claims politically motivated violence is rare in the U.S., but that when it happens, “right-wing terrorists” are more often to blame than the left — that is, when you exclude the terrorists who killed 2,977 victims on Sept. 11, 2001, and exclude injuries, property damage, and people who were not killed. Thus, his criteria exclude the two assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, for example. Additionally, Duke found that some of the crimes Nowrasteh blamed on the right were at best questionable and at worst downright wrong.
Duke pointed to another lopsided study by the Anti-Defamation League, which also claims the right is to blame for increased political violence. Ryan James Girdusky unpacked those magic numbers and noted glaring omissions. For example, the ADL left the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson out of its study.
Despite the evidence all pointing to Kirk’s killer being on the left wing of the ideological spectrum, the conspiracy theory about a right-wing shooter was pushed by a host of Democratic members of Congress, high-profile left-wing activists, liberal social media influencers, and more.
The most common evidence-free claim on the left has been that the shooter was a follower of far right influencer Nick Fuentes.
Lot’s more quotes from various lefty idiots asserting this connection without proof at the link.
As each new detail trickled out, and the killer’s transgender associations became clearer and clearer, the hysterical spin and assertions of blunt unreality mounted. Cynical pros began inserting outright lies into the mix, as partisan myrmidons took up their work and used it in desperate, craven attempts to either spin facts in ridiculous ways (“his parents are Republicans!”) or simply pretend the facts weren’t “facts” at all. All of it was done with the intent of trying to will into existence — through the spread of fear, uncertainty, and doubt — an alternate narrative whose intended moral calculus amounted to, in so many words, Charlie Kirk was killed by his own team, and this is actually your fault.
So, no, I’m not about to move on just yet.
I could understand a certain amount of denialism at first, because I understand human nature. For those on the left who treat politics like a substitute religion — an increasing number of people in our irreligious age — this moment has been akin to seeing several of the central tenets of your faith publicly refuted. The revelation of the identity of the alleged shooter and the reports about his beliefs were arguably the worst possible scenario for the sorts of loud Democratic types who are deeply invested in the idea of the MAGA right as America’s true fever-swamp of hatred and violence.
I can understand ignorance as well, because I depend on documenting it for a job — the Carnival of Fools would have to fold up its tent without it. In the days before the suspect was caught, it was natural that desperate progressives who get their news from left-wing authorities would use that span of time — when the killer was still at large — to conjure their own arcane interpretive theories in defiance of the known evidence. I feel inevitable disgust at these sad attempts at spin — I know who publicly celebrated the attack on Kirk, after all, and it wasn’t anyone on my side — but again, it was expected.
But I can’t understand any of this after Tyler Robinson was caught on Friday morning. At that point, mere ignorance and wish-casting turned into an active disinformation campaign, and it was particularly appalling to see from people whose civic responsibility it is to know better. To take one example, how about the repellent Eric Swalwell? On Friday afternoon, in an audaciously sleazy bit of “partial storytelling,” the California congressman tweeted: “It doesn’t matter that Kirk’s killer was a straight white male. Or that he was from a Republican family that voted for Donald Trump. Violence has NEVER been the answer.”
If he thought this was a cute joke, he’s a moral reprobate. If he thought it was an effective deceit, he’s also a moral reprobate. I think it is thus fair to conclude that he’s a moral reprobate. The jury’s still out on his fellow California Democratic congressman Dave Min, however, who may simply be stupid. Min said on Saturday: “Now that the Charlie Kirk assassin has been identified as MAGA, I’m sure Donald Trump, Elon Musk and all the insane GOP politicians who called for retribution against the ‘RADICAL LEFT’ will now shift their focus to stopping the toxic violence of the RADICAL RIGHT.” (As it turns out, Dave? No, we won’t!)
How about Harvard Law professor — and Joe Biden legal adviser — Laurence Tribe? Tribe announced on Twitter that the killer “seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals.” (How he got that idea is anybody’s guess.) Later, he deleted the tweet and posted a non-apology accusing the right of “making things up” by associating the killer with transgender or left-wing causes. I can only tell you that once upon a time he had a fine legal mind.
I certainly can’t say the same for Heather Cox Richardson, the world’s most-followed Substacker. Richardson is a Temu Tribe, an oracle of the complacently progressive academic establishment, and demonstrated it once again by going on a podcast on Friday to claim that the killer was a “right-winger” and all those outraged conservatives online were now retreating “in a real hurry.” (Lest you think that was an error born of speaking off the cuff, Richardson put it in writing as well.)
Now that the gaslighting has become impossible to sustain, the left has moved on to its last line of defense: “Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed whom.” It will be a long time before I forget the five days I have just spent being gaslighted both by political operators as well as people who remain transparently in denial. I expected better of them. I held them only to the standards that I hold myself. It was a mistake.
“Trump golf club gunman [Ryan Routh] found guilty after assassination attempt; tries to stab self in court.” The left is sending us an endless parade of violent lunatics and losers.
One of former President Joe Biden’s top aides – Jeff Zients, told the House Oversight Committee on Thursday that an aide with his email credentials was green lighting some of the most controversial ‘autopen’ pardons, that Hunter Biden – who received an insane pardon himself – was involved in the pardon discussions, and that Joe Biden’s brain was pea soup.
According to Axios, Zients – one of the highest ranking officials from the Biden White House – confirmed that Joe Biden had difficulty remembering dates and names, and often required extra briefings to make decisions during the final years of his presidency.
Instead of having three meetings before making a decision, for example, Biden would want four.
Zients said Biden had long had trouble with names and dates, but acknowledged to investigators that the president’s memory of such facts got worse in the final years of his term.
Jill Biden, meanwhile, spoke with Zients about ‘managing Joe’ as Zients was readying himself to take on the role of Chief of Staff in early 2023 – urging him to adjust Biden’s schedule so he could get more rest and return to the White House residence earlier in the evening.
Longtime Biden aide and deputy CoS Annie Tomasini also spoke with Zients about limiting Biden’s schedule and shortening distances and stairs.
According to Fox News, Zients “admitted that President Biden’s speech stumbles increased as he aged,” adding “He also noted that the president’s difficulty remembering dates and names worsened over time, including during the administration.”
Also interesting – Zients told investigators that Hunter Biden was involved in discussions about presidential pardons towards the end of Biden’s term, which included the blanket pardons of several members of the Biden family issued during Joe’s final 24 hours in office. It had been previously reported by NBC News that Hunter was sitting in on White House meetings following the former president’s horrible performance during a June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.
And just like that millions of lefty sorts who piously sand “No one’s above the law!” for the ginned-up Trump indictments all automatically switched to “This is a dangerous precedent!” when it comes to indicting James Comey.
Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted on criminal charges related to allegations that he lied to Congress during testimony in 2020 about whether he authorized a leak of information.
Comey is facing one count of false statements and one count of obstruction of justice, according to a release from the Department of Justice.
“No one is above the law. Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
President Trump reacted gleefully to the indictment in a statement shared to Truth Social.
“JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI.”
“Today he was indicted by a Grand Jury on two felony counts for various illegal and unlawful acts. He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Comey’s indictment in Virginia federal court comes just days before the statute of limitations for the perjury charge was set to run out. The charges come five years after Comey testified on September 30, 2020, before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak information to the press related to the investigations of either possible collusion between Trump and Russia or Hillary Clinton’s use of an unauthorized email system.
During the hearing, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) asked Comey whether he had authorized leaks related to either investigation. Comey reiterated what he said in 2017 congressional testimony, that he had not.
Cruz argued that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had said Comey authorized at least one such disclosure, related to the Clinton investigation. But the Justice Department inspector general found in 2018 that McCabe had “lacked candor when he told Comey, or made statements that led Comey to believe, that McCabe had not authorized the disclosure and did not know who did.”
The charges also center in part on an October 2016 New York Times report, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”
The Times article was in response to reporting in Slate that Trump had established a communications back channel with the Kremlin, involving servers at Trump Tower in Manhattan and Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions.
Hours after the Slate article was published, the Times report related the FBI’s conclusion that the back-channel claim was unfounded. The report also detailed that the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s malign activities in connection with the 2016 campaign were not linked to Trump and his campaign.
Special counsel John Durham probed the leaks to the Times in connection with the story as an unauthorized public disclosure (UPD) of classified information.
The February 2020 closing memorandum for the probe, obtained by veteran journalist Catherine Herridge, found there were two major government sources for the story: James Baker, FBI general counsel and a close adviser to Comey, and FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki. Baker told investigators that he was “under the belief” that he was “ultimately instructed and authorized to [provide information to the Times] by then FBI Director James Comey.”
However, Baker did not claim that Comey gave him a direct order. “Baker indicated that FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki instructed him (Baker) to disclose the information to the NYT, and Baker understood Rybicki was conveying this instruction and authorization from Comey.”
A Dallas U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility was the target of a shooting Wednesday morning that left two detainees dead, one person injured, and the suspect committing suicide at the scene.
According to the Dallas Police Department, law enforcement responded to a call at a Dallas ICE facility after reports that someone had opened fire from an adjacent building.
Two detainees were pronounced dead, with another being rushed to the hospital in critical condition with a gunshot injury.
The suspected shooter, a white male armed with a rifle on a roof, died by suicide as agents approached, FOX4 Dallas reported.
ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons spoke to CNN about the shooting as the event unfolded, saying that the scene is secure and the shooter is “down from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
Bullets found had anti-ICE slogans written on them.
Why people who kept freaking out at Trump negotiating with Putin shouldn’t have. “Trump Says Ukraine Can Win Back All of Its Territory from Russia.”
President Donald Trump declared his belief Tuesday that Ukraine can win its war against Russia outright, an extraordinary shift in tone with significant ramifications for U.S. policy.
Trump shared his views on Truth Social after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
“I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option,” Trump said.
Trump’s position is a 180-degree shift from his longstanding view that Ukraine would have to cede territory to Russia as a condition for ending the war. Moscow holds roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory after invading its neighbor three-and-a-half years ago. Russian forces have slowly made gains along the eastern part of Ukraine in what has become a grueling war of attrition with hundreds of thousands of estimated casualties.
Trump argued Russia is a “paper tiger” and suggested Russian people were not aware of the damage Russian President Vladimir Putin has done to their nation. He also praised the “Great Spirit” of Ukraine and said Ukraine could “maybe even go further” than reclaiming its original territory. Trump’s comments are a stark contrast from his past statements that argued Russia was winning the war and likened Zelensky to a dictator.
Trump promised the U.S. would keep sending weapons to NATO for the alliance to use in the way it sees fit. His comments will likely prompt a furious response from Putin and Russian forces in Ukraine. It also remains to be seen how Trump’s restraint-oriented cabinet members and political allies react to his unexpected shift.
As previously observed, Trump’s negotiating strategy works on persuasion and tit-for-tat strategies. Zelensky, after some early stumbles, is finally fully onboard with Trump, while Putin hasn’t offered anything in return to Trump’s overtures. That means that Zelensky gets all the carrots, and Putin gets all the sticks. Golly, who could have seen that one coming except everyone who’s actually watched Trump operate for the last ten years who isn’t suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Ukraine launched another big drone strike, this one on the Saratov oil refinery in Bryanskaya Ulitsa, Saratov Oblast, the third time they’ve hit it since August.
Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth has summoned 800 generals and admirals from around the world to Washington D.C. without telling them what for. They’re going to be pretty surprised when he announces that he’s brought all of them there to talk about Amway…
23-year-old Hunter Nadeau was arrested on scene for shooting multiple victims at the Sky Meadow Country Club in Nashau, New Hampshire, Saturday night. A 59-year-old named Robert DeCesare was killed in front of his family. At least two others were injured.
Tom Bartelson of Pepperell, Massachusetts, is the witness in the video above. He was at his nephew’s wedding in a private room of the club when the gunman entered the building dressed in all black. The shooter yelled, “The children are safe!” and “Free Palestine!” before killing DeCesare. He then moved into the club restaurant and opened fire again.
Funny no matter what the leftwing cause, the solution seems to be murdering American citizens.
A once-celebrated Boston social activist has pleaded guilty to defrauding donors — including Black Lives Matter — out of thousands of dollars that she used as a personal piggy bank.
Monica Cannon-Grant, 44, pleaded guilty Monday to 18 counts of fraud-related crimes that she committed with her late husband while operating their Violence in Boston (VIB) activists group, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts.
The activist scammed money — including $3,000 from a BLM group — while claiming it was to help feed children and run protests like one in 2020 over the murder of George Floyd and police violence.
Cannon-Grant also conned her way into getting $100,000 in federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits — which she used to pay off her personal auto loan and car insurance policy.
But she has now confessed to transferring funds to personal bank accounts to pay for rent, shopping sprees, delivery meals, visits to a nail salon — and even a summer vacation to Maryland.
At least 187 code packages made available through the JavaScript repository NPM have been infected with a self-replicating worm that steals credentials from developers and publishes those secrets on GitHub, experts warn. The malware, which briefly infected multiple code packages from the security vendor CrowdStrike, steals and publishes even more credentials every time an infected package is installed.
You may remember Crowdstrike from such hits as “we helped Hillary Clinton illegally erase her secret email server.”
Speaking of technology running amok: “OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws.” That sounds like the sort6 of cruel fact that should throw a kink in all of these AI company’s getting trillion dollar valuations but somehow won’t.
In California, 13 year old boy killed by sex-abusing, illegal alien soccer coach. The family of boy is “suing Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles for failing to perform a background check on the coach.”
Turns out that when conservatives said they were being unfairly censored due to Biden Administration pressure, they were right all along. “YouTube Lifts Ban on Censored Creators, Admits Biden Admin Pressure Was ‘Unacceptable.'”
Google is making major changes to YouTube’s free speech policies following pressure from House Republicans and shifts among its top competitors.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), an attorney for Alphabet, Google and YouTube’s parent company, announced a series of changes to YouTube’s approach to free speech, including the return of banned creators to the platform and the implementation of a community notes system to replace third-party fact-checkers.
YouTube is rolling back its restrictive policies surrounding political speech, especially the Covid-19 pandemic and elections. The video platform said its reliance on public health authorities was well intentioned, but expressed regret at its impact on public debate on issues that were far from settled.
More broadly, YouTube admitted senior Biden administration officials conducted extensive outreach to YouTube to influence its approach to “misinformation” and Covid-19 content that did not violate YouTube’s policies.
“Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies,” the letter reads.
While YouTube independently enforced its policies, Biden officials “continued to press the Company” to remove content that did not violate the platform’s policies. The letter calls out Biden and other administration officials for creating a “political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms” under the guise of “misinformation.”
President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order later this week declaring that an emerging deal involving the video-sharing app TikTok meets American security needs and constitutes a qualified divestiture under U.S. law, according to people familiar with the matter.
Under the deal, American tech company Oracle will serve as the app’s security provider, which will independently monitor the source code of the app as well as study how a U.S.-controlled copy of the TikTok content recommendation algorithm operates and interacts with phone features and updates.
Oracle will be required to “retrain” a leased duplicate TikTok algorithm…
So it will not necessarily be a Chinese spyware app any more, but will still be malware for your brain…
Good news from the border! “Texas, Southwest Region See ‘Historically Low’ Southern Border Apprehensions in August.”
Texas’ border jurisdictions are scrambling to manage thousands of pending Operation Lone Star cases after key state partners abruptly pulled out, leaving local officials to coordinate housing and transportation for defendants.
Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told Texas Scorecard the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), both of which helped provide housing for illegal crossers arrested under the border security initiative, are no longer handling those responsibilities.
The Del Rio Processing Center is reportedly shutting down, along with Val Verde County’s detention facility—the original epicenter of Operation Lone Star (OLS) prosecutions.
“We’re left holding the bag,” Smith said. “Counties are having to figure this out on their own without the infrastructure the state had in place.”
Smith said approximately half of all prosecutions tied to OLS in Kinney County have already been resolved, either through pleas or dismissals, but thousands of cases remain active.
According to numbers from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, more than 2,600 felony cases have already been resolved. Nearly 2,000 cases are still pending, in part due to lengthy appeals.
Meanwhile, the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office has more than 700 outstanding warrants for alleged smugglers and another 1,400 warrants that have not yet been executed because of limited capacity to house and transport defendants.
Kinney County has contracts with about 10 jails across Texas—including some as far away as the Panhandle—but the county jail cannot hold a person beyond 72 hours, as it is considered a temporary holding facility. That has forced sheriffs and prosecutors into a patchwork system for transferring detainees, with major bottlenecks since TDCJ and TDEM stopped coordinating.
The Dolph Briscoe Unit in Dilley and the Segovia Unit in Edinburg, which had filled major housing roles, are no longer available, worsening the shortage.
Plus border counties have been avoid arresting women because they don’t have room for them in separate facilities.
Amazon settles a lawsuit for tricking people into signing up for Prime and making it nearly impossibility to cancel to the tune of $2.5 billion.
So where did President Trump get the crazy idea that using Tylenol during pregnancy could result in autism? A Harvard study. “Using acetaminophen during pregnancy may increase children’s autism and ADHD risk.”
Austin Yogurt Shop Murders finally solved? retired Austin detective John Jones fingered serial killer and rapist Robert Eugene Brashers (who died in a standoff with police in 1999) as the culprit. Brashers is a serial killer and rapist who committed at least three murders between 1990 and 1998 in the states of South Carolina and Missouri. He died in January 1999 by suicide during a standoff with police. Evidently a new type of DNA testing finally matched up Brashers as the culprit.
More scenes from The Fall Of England: “Muslim who shouted ‘I’m going to kill you’ while stabbing man is given suspended sentence by British court; victim charged instead.”
UK’s Labour government thought they could get away with some cost-free virtue signaling by recognizing “a Palestinian state.” Surprise! “UK could face claim for $2,700,000,000,000 in reparations for recognizing Palestinian state.”
Gov. Greg Abbott today announced a $5.5 million grant from Texas for the construction of a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Harris County — one of multiple projects approved under the Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation (JETI) program over the past year.
Abbott joined Eli Lilly and Company executives for a press conference on Tuesday afternoon in Houston to announce its creation of a nearly one million-square foot active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing facility. The company estimated that it’ll produce around 600 new jobs and will invest more than $6.5 billion within the state.
The grant of $5.5 million towards Lilly’s new project was made possible through the JETI approval process, a property tax abatement program established through contentious legislation passed during the 88th regular legislative session.
House Bill (HB) 5, which was signed into law by Abbott in June 2023, replaced a 20-year-old initiative with a new economic incentive program. It created a pathway for school districts to grant companies a decade-long break in their property tax payments in exchange for relocation to their area. It limited the kinds of companies eligible to receive abatements and grants for projects in Texas, excluding renewable energy projects after negotiations proved its removal to be necessary for passage in the Legislature.
Let me reiterate my general opposition to government subsidies of business in almost all circumstances. Government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers. However, an end to subsidizing money-losing “renewable energy” sources that made the Texas Interconnect Grid less reliable is a big plus.
One of the first projects approved under JETI this year, also in Harris County, was to assist Summit Next Gen in opening “a world-class sustainable aviation fuel manufacturing and refining facility along the Texas Gulf Coast,” in January 2025. It’s expected to produce over $1.6 billion in capital investment for Texas.
In February, Abbott made two JETI expansion project announcements: one for a new Braven Environmental facility in Texarkana, estimated to rake in more than $145 million in investment for the state, and the other for Vinton Steel’s “advanced manufacturing facility that recycles ferrous scrap into new steel products.” Vinton is expected to invest over $229 million in the state and create an additional 180 new jobs.
Brazos Midland Processing LLC, also known as Brazos Midstream, was announced as an approved recipient in late August for a “300 million cubic feet per day natural gas processing plant” in Martin County, expected to create $185 million in capital investment.
At Tuesday’s announcement of the new Lilly project, Abbott reiterated that “Texas is the best state in America for doing business.”
And speaking of unreliable renewable energy subsidies: “$2.2 billion solar plant in California scheduled to be turned off after years of wasted money.” That would be Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert, the one that used mirrors to concentrate light onto a single tower, and which fried lots of birds every year. I’m surprised that it was still running, given how markedly unsuccessful it’s been at generating affordable energy years ago. But I may be confusing it with the similar (and similarly failed) Crescent Dunes project. That’s the one that suffered the molten salt leaks… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Dwight also brought news of the deaths of two murderous leftwing scumbags: Would-be Gerald R. Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore, and JoAnne Chesimard, aka “Assata Shakur”, of the Black Liberation Army, who murdered New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. The latter died in Havana. Rot in hell, commie.
California attorney hit with $10,000 fine for brief filled with fake ChatGPT quotes. “The Los Angeles-area attorney fined last week, Amir Mostafavi, told the court that he did not read text generated by the AI model before submitting the appeal in July 2023, months after OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as capable of passing the bar exam.” The real fine should be no client ever willing to trust his lazy ass again..
This is pretty damn funny:
The White House has placed a photo of an auto-pen signature instead of a portrait of former President Biden on the “Presidential Walk of Fame” pic.twitter.com/4HRU7g8Vr8
“The radical Lower East Side shop that lured drug addicts to its storefront by offering free clothing, food and Narcan suddenly shut down Tuesday — sparking internal warfare and finger pointing.”
Without warning, Bluestockings Cooperative announced that it would permanently shut down after more than 26 years, stating that “daily operations are unfortunately no longer sustainable on multiple fronts.”
“This was our absolute last resort. On top of our crew’s ongoing struggle against the organized abandonment of New York City and the constant crises, the remaining worker-owner and staff are at the limits of what they can manage in terms of health, disability, and finances,” a statement posted to Instagram reads.
The Suffolk Street shop blamed the closure on its failure as a worker-owned cooperative to “come to consensus around the guiding principles and practices Bluestockings should embody” — adding that an inability to align on political and business operations directly led to the setbacks the business faced over the last two years.
“Of course, $12,000 a month in rent, thousands in utilities, and racist, classist violence from ‘neighbors’ certainly didn’t make our work any easier,” the statement continued.
Bluestockings came under intense outrage from its posh Lower East Side neighborhood, which transformed into a “zombie apocalypse” of strung-out junkies shooting up in broad daylight who were drawn to the bookstore’s free and indiscriminate services.
The self-described “radically inclusive” shop was a state-recognized Opiate Overdose Prevention Program and offered “harm reduction services” like Narcan, drug-testing strips and a used needle-drop off bin — which neighbors alleged enabled the junkies.
In recent years, Bluestockings plunged into around $100,000 in debt to its publishers and book distributors, according to reports.
Social justice is incompatible with both profit and basic human decency. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
If you live in the City of Austin, today the City Council will be hearing testimony on a sneaky proposal to buy AI-enabled surveillance cameras that they scheduled without giving mere citizens a chance to comment. Louis Rossmann has the details:
“Today, I’m going be making the case for every single one of you who lives in the city of Austin to show up to City Hall September 25th, 10:00AM.”
“In a few videos I’ve done recently, I talked about these AI powered surveillance cameras that are everywhere and why I don’t like them.”
“These AI powered surveillance cameras [have] been going up all over the country. They’ve been used for everything from police officers spying on their exes to people getting pulled over on the side of the highway because the AI powered camera got a seven or a three or seven and a B wrong, and just nonsense like this.”
“And a lot of people signed up for a hearing that was 10:00AM on a Thursday morning.”
“10:00AM on a Thursday morning on a Thursday morning is a really bad time to have a hearing because most people are going to be at work. And many of you were saying, ‘I don’t think they’re going to listen to me anyway.'”
“I did a video, came out and they said, ‘There’s no way in hell these people are actually going to cancel after getting you to take off work at 10:00AM on a Thursday with no notice.’ Unfortunately, that’s what they did. Over 10 years in in lobbying, never seen some shit like this.”
So they bring the item back for September 25th, but do it in a really sneaky way. “I go to check the agenda. I search for LiveView. I notice it’s not in the agenda. However, even though it’s not on the agenda, it shows up in Public Communication General. The only two people that are scheduled to speak are Kevin Rabininoitz and Kohar Ramini…Investment into LiveView Technologies for cameras at Austin Parks. LiveView Technologies Parks and Rec contract for mobile security units. There’s no agenda item.”
“So, I’m not able to sign up to speak, but they are.”
Turns out you have to sign up to speak 21 days before the meeting. The meeting they didn’t announce in advance for the item that’s not listed. “A person who intends to speak during general public communication must register between 9:00AM on the 21st day before the council meeting at which the person intends to speak, and 4:30PM on the 14th day before the council meeting at which the person intends to speak via the online form of the city’s website, by telephone, or in person. And this is a separate form than the form that you use to speak on regular issues.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen on Thursday morning. People who work as the lead salespeople at this company are going to show up and they’re going to speak to the City Council and they’re going to speak to you and they’re going to tell you why it is you’re going to sign a contract for $400,000 to $2 million of AI powered surveillance all over your city and you’re not allowed to say anything back.”
The marketing representative for the company said that they’re not going to use the cameras for facial recognition, but guess what? Their website says “Video analytics is a technology that utilizes artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms to automatically analyze video content from surveillance cameras, enables functionality such as facial recognition.”
Supposedly the cameras are for crime prevention. Fine. But that makes me wonder why they want to put them in parks rather than, say, crime hot spots like Sixth Street? Because they’re too bulky to locate there?
Though they say customers own all the data, it’s all be fed to LiveView’s own backend servers.
Rossmann is hoping that lots of people show up to express their opposition to the surveillance cameras, and has a page up on when and where to show up today to make your voice heard. (Given that I live outside the boundaries of Austin, I will not be going, though I’d still like to interview Rossmann on a variety of topics one day.)
There’s a case to be made for surveillance cameras in public places in crime hot spots, but not ones using unproven AI technology. And these bulky, solar-powered things aren’t going in crime hot spots, they’re going in public parks. True, there was been a plague of drug-addicted transients living in parks since former mayor Steve Adler invited them into the city, but these expensive, stationary things seem particularly unsuited to combing the parks for illegal campers; you’d be better off hiring more park employees to do that for the same money. Or, better yet, hiring more APD officers, as the city still hasn’t fully recovered from the damage done by the “defund the police” madness.
So there’s a case, but not for these bulky things, at this extravagant price, and not in city parks most days of the year. (I can see a partial exception for things like the gates of big outdoor public concerts, like ACL, or for the entrance to the Zilker trail of lights. Even then, there are better, cheaper alternatives available.) I also see a parallel with gunshot acoustic tracking systems, which were similarly hyped, similarly expensive, and seemed to yield practically no real-world benefits.
Rossmann is right: This thing stinks to high heaven, and it certainly smells like various palms have been greased to get this thing to slide through on the sly. Hopefully there’s enough outcry to put the kibosh on this bad, expensive idea.
This seems like a story that should have gotten a lot more attention than it has. “Secret Service Dismantles Weaponized SIM Farms Designed To ‘Shut Down’ NYC Cell Networks.”
Hours before President Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. Secret Service announced that it had dismantled a massive, decentralized SIM farm network, just 35 miles from New York City, hidden inside five abandoned apartment buildings. The telecommunications stealth weapon was capable of paralyzing regional cell networks through denial-of-service attacks.
Key Details from the Secret Service Report:
Investigators seized 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites.
The devices enabled anonymous threats, encrypted communications, and could launch telecom attacks such as:
Disabling cell towers
Denial-of-service attacks
Secure communication for criminal enterprises
If you want secure communications networks, there are lots of cheaper ways to do it that don’t involve rooms of rackmountable servers full of SIM cards. This setup suggests a big planned infrastructure hit.
Early analysis shows links between nation-state actors and known criminals.
CBS News described the seizure as the largest of its kind, noting the network was scattered across abandoned apartment buildings at more than five sites, roughly 35 miles from New York City.
Pretty ballsy to just pick abandoned apartment buildings and go “Hey, let’s just move lots of really expensive equipment in here for a future attack. I’m sure no one will notice.”
“This network had the potential to disable cell phone towers and essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City,” Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Matt McCool stated in a video released in the report by the agency.
Beyond DDoS attacks, the SIM farms could also support psychological warfare operations such as:
CBS, citing multiple officials briefed on the probe, reported that early findings suggest the network was used for communications between foreign governments and individuals already known to U.S. law enforcement.
In our view, the likelihood of this being part of a larger threat vector for potential physical terrorism appears elevated. Consider this: disrupting communications in tandem with a physical attack would be the playbook for foreign adversaries…
The Secret Service tweet shows an awful lot of specialized hardware:
The Secret Service dismantled a network of more than 300 SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards in the New York-area that were capable of crippling telecom systems and carrying out anonymous telephonic attacks, disrupting the threat before world leaders arrived for the UN General… pic.twitter.com/sZKUeGqvGY
The scale of the thing suggests a state actor behind the plot, most likely China or Russia.
A bigger concern is that such a telecom infrastructure attack probably wouldn’t be the main attack, but likely a secondary attack to slow response to or amplify the chaos of the primary attack. You don’t spend this much time and effort to annoy New Yorkers for a day or two before countermeasures can be deployed.
No, this was a supporting element for something much bigger.
Back in the heyday of Cyberpunk and the beginning of the Internet Revolution, there was a saying bandied about by Bruce Sterling and others: information wants to be free. That tendency for information to escape the bounds placed by repressive governments helped pull down the Berlin Wall and end the Soviet Union.
Despite that, governments around the world still continue to impose censorship on information they deem to hurt their own preferred narratives, despite the colossal failure of all but complete totalitarian regimes like North Korea to prevent such information from spreading. Just look at how all the truths the Democrat media complex and European elites wanted to hide in 2020 eventually came out, and the effort to censor them in the name of “fighting misinformation” ended up backfiring.
The latest example of a regime attempting to hide information they don’t like comes from Nepal, where two days ago the commie government tried to ban social media platforms.
Nepal’s government has banned dozens of social media platforms after they failed to comply with new registration requirements, disrupting essential communication and raising concerns over free speech.
The 26 blocked platforms include messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and WeChat, as well as websites like YouTube and LinkedIn.
The ban, which went into effect on Thursday after a one-week ultimatum to the social media companies expired, has caused confusion across the country. It has ignited fears about how it could affect press freedom and the tourism industry, and particularly about how families can continue to communicate with relatives working abroad as migrant laborers. About 7.5 percent of Nepal’s 29 million population was living abroad in 2021, according to census figures cited by the Nepal Economic Forum, a research institute.
Officials at Nepal’s ministry of communication and information technology said the ban was enforced after the platforms refused to comply with a new law regulating social media, despite several formal requests.
Sounds an awful lot like what the EU is trying to do, doesn’t it?
The proper response to all such government demands is “Get bent!”
Gen Z protesters have set fire to Nepal’s parliament and the prime minister’s house, forcing his resignation, amid a deadly crackdown on dissent sparked by a social media ban.
There’s video:
KP Sharma Oli, the four-time prime minister and leader of the Communist Party, stood down on Tuesday after violent youth demonstrations in Kathmandu left at least 19 people dead and more than 500 injured on Monday.
So a commie wanted to censor his own people. What are the odds?
The unprecedented violence left the capital shrouded in smoke and forced security forces to retreat, with ministers reportedly plucked to safety by military helicopters after some were chased down the street and assaulted.
Corrupt commies deserve to end up like Nicolae Ceausescu.
Oh yeah, corruption. People exposing that was a big reason why the government wanted to impose censorship.
What are the protesters’ demands?
Their two main demands have been clear: the government lifting the ban on social media, which has now happened, and officials putting an end to what they call “corrupt practices”.
Protesters, many of them college students, have linked the social media blockade with curtailing freedom of speech, and widespread allegations of corruption among politicians.
“We want to see an end to corruption in Nepal,” Binu KC, a 19-year-old college student, told BBC Nepali. “Leaders promise one thing during elections but never deliver. They are the cause of so many problems.” She added the social media ban had disrupted her education, limiting access to online classes and study resources.
Subhana Budhathoki, a content creator, echoed the frustration: “Gen Z will not stop now. This protest is about more than just social media – it’s about silencing our voices, and we won’t let that happen.”
What is the ‘NepoKids’ trend and how is it related to these protests?
A defining feature of the protest has been the widespread use of two slogans -#Nepo Baby and #Nepo Kids.
These two terms have gained popularity on social media in the past few weeks after a number of videos showing the lavish lifestyles of politicians and their families went viral in Nepal.
Protesters argue these individuals enjoy success and luxury without merit, living off public money while ordinary Nepalis struggle.
Viral videos on TikTok and Instagram have contrasted the lavish lifestyles of political families — involving designer clothes, foreign travel and luxury cars — with the harsh realities faced by young people, including unemployment and forced migration.
The slogans have become symbolic of a deeper frustration with inequality, as protesters compare the lives of the elite with those of everyday citizens.
William Gibson once said that the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. A cyberpunk revolution against an oppressive communist regime sounds like it should have happened in the 1990s, but Nepal is finally getting theirs in 2025.
Let’s hope they drive the commie scumbags out of power entirely.
As greed, bias and AI enshittification continues to degrade Google’s once-vaunted search dominance into barely usable garbage, similar problems are degrading the usefulness of video searches on YouTube.
For once it’s not the ad block wars, as the ad-blockers (and ad-block blocker blockers) seemed to have handily gained the upper hand for the last several weeks. What’s ruining YouTube right now are shorts and AI slop.
For some reason, the powers that be at Google/YouTube have decided that just being the most dominate video platform in the world isn’t enough, and what they really want to do is mimic the braindead hellscape that is TikTok. Hence the bite-sized morsels of annoyance that are Shorts. A good bit of the time, when I’m on YouTube, I’m looking for content to post here. (Or at least that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.) Shorts, being non-embedable, are useless to me. Plus I have no desire to be shunted into your scrolling TikTok clone.
The first tool needed to reverse the enshittification of YouTube is a way to exclude Shorts from search results.
The second thing enshittifying YouTube is the AI Slop infecting the platform these days. Now, I don’t object to the mere existence of AI generated videos there, as some are pretty interesting and/or amusing, like those “Super Panavision” Star Wars re-imaginings, or the imaginary Wes Anderson remakes.
What I object to is those being plopped down in my video feed and search results without any disclaimer that they’re AI. Worse still, AI videos are not only being created and uploaded more than ever, they’re actually being created exponentially and algorithmically, as shown in this Speeed video from five months ago (which I think I’ve linked to before).
It’s one thing when a human tells an AI to create a video, but quite another when AIs are automatically spamming videos to YouTube without human intervention, a mindless army of sorcerer’s apprentices creating more sorcerer’s apprentices, just on the off-chance they’ll suck in enough eyeballs to monetize their ever-rising tide of slop.
Worse, these two flaws combine when setting the previously quite useful “Upload date” filter for video searches. For a lot of things, almost the entire feed is now AI slop shorts that combine the worst of both worlds. For a non-political example, a search for “dog rescue” videos quickly turns up obvious AI slop like this, or this, or this.
They second tool needed to fight the enshittification of YouTube is a new category for the “Report” button where you can label something “AI Slop,” and then have a search option to exclude things tagged AI slop from your search results.
These are two obvious moves to improve the quality of the user experience. So naturally, I don’t expect the powers-that-be at YouTube/Google to implement them…
Another week, another example of AI hallucinating in a way detrimental to human beings.
Kneon: “We’re going to talk about Open AI adding mental health safeguards to chat GPT because apparently it’s feeding into users delusions.”
K: “It’s telling them that they’re they’ve got superpowers, or that they’re the chosen one.”
Geeky Sparkles: “If you have chat GPT trying to generate something for you, if they don’t have the information, they’ll make up or whatever, cuz it’s just programmed to please you.”
GS: “So when you have people who have um mental health issues, and they might be delusional in some way, it’s going to reaffirm that, which is not helpful.”
K: “Apparently, it’s causing issues in relationships. People are using it as a marriage counselor, relationship counselor.”
GS: “Oh no.”
K: “A 30-year-old man with autism was hospitalized for manic episodes and an emotional breakdown after chat GPT reinforced his belief he had discovered a way to bend time.”
AI doesn’t tell you the truth, it tells you what you want to hear, or some stochastic approximation of truth laid down by process you probably don’t understand. It’s a salesman that doesn’t even know its lying because it has no human conception of “truth.”
K: “A 30-year-old man on the autism spectrum had no previous diagnosis of mental illness. He asked ChatGpt to find flaws with his amateur theory on faster than light travel. He became convinced he had made a stunning scientific breakthrough. When Irwin questioned the chatbot’s validation of his ideas, the bot encouraged him, telling him his theory was sound.” So AI has less “common sense” than an average high school science fiction fan…
K: “And when Irwin showed signs of psychological distress, the chatbot assured him he was fine.”
GS: “Well, right there, you’re asking a chatbot if you’re okay. That’s your first indication that you’re not okay.”
GS: “If you don’t watch it, it’ll just make up shit. It’ll make up quotes, it’ll make up numbers, it’ll make up that’s why you have to double check everything anymore. Because you know sometimes these bots are running amuck as far as articles and stuff are concerned, and people don’t check.”
Just imagine what Chuck Jones could do with “Bot Amuck”
K: “YouTube is completely littered with all these like fake videos, not even like, ‘Hey, we’re bending the news.’ No, it’s ‘we’re just making shit up,’ like so-and-so died, or this is a big lawsuit going on with so and so and so and so and, oh my god, that’s not real.”
Sadly, So-And-So is, in fact, dead
GS: “You especially can’t expect ChatGPT to tell you the truth about things like, ‘Am I mentally ill?'”
The isolation of the pandemic also left some people broken and lonely. K: “They just can’t make those human connections again.”
GS: “ChatGPT, they’re worried, is stunting people mentally.”
GS: “It’s actually making them dumber.”
GS: “If it’s telling you you can bend space and time, it’s probably not telling you the truth.”
I’m skipping over the whole “sad, lonely men turning to AI ‘girlfriends'” thing.
It’s possible that the rational, infallible, near God-like AI envisioned by our venture capital TechLords could have been developed. On Vulcan. By a select caste of priest king logicians dedicated to pure truth. In the 23rd century.
But that’s not the AI we have. The AI we have was birthed in the weirdness of the social justice/pandemic era by very irrational human beings. Garbage in/garbage out.
Real artificial intelligence was always going to be a long-shot, but AI had the misfortune of having the technological underpinnings that allowed it to arrive and grow at the exact same time that one of the most irrational movements in human history infected the overclass with wokeness. Not only are the terminally woke incapable of telling the truth, they deny the very possibility of objective truth in favor of their subjective “lived experience.”
To be sure, wokeness was not the only madness around when the the TechLords unleashed their bottlejinn to krill-feed data in the vast ocean of the Internet, but social justice has been the most pervasive flavor of madness.
