Your tax dollars help fund Hamas (and Brazil’s leftist censorship regime), Kathy Hochul and Gavin Newsom will do anything to keep Trump from deporting illegal aliens, Ukraine hits more natural gas facilities and data centers, and actually knocks some Russian trolls offline, a reckoning is finally coming for Ilhan Omar’s misdeeds, Musk unveils a flying car, and Hasan Piker endorses lynching black people. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Your tax dollars at work: “Louisiana Muslims Were on Medicaid While Sending Money to Terrorists.”
Between late 2023 and early this year, Abdel Adhami allegedly transferred more than $83,000, mostly through PayPal to financial associates of a Gaza-based contact who converted the funds into Tether cryptocurrency. Court records say about $2,000 was sent directly to Gaza through Western Union to a recipient who picked up the cash in October 2023.
His brother, Omar, is accused of sending about $6,000 through similar channels. Authorities say the money was ultimately routed to people associated with Saleem Alzaq, whom investigators describe as the brothers’ alleged handler in Gaza.
For example, on or about October 18, 2023, Adhami, via Snapchat account aadhami56, sent a voice message to Snapchat account “saleem_alzaq” stating the following: “I wish we could come, I wish we could help you, I wish we could do Jihad with you, you are the people of Jihad, you are the people of perseverance, you are who the Prophet, peace and prayer be upon him, has mentioned. Congratulations, congratulations, you are the free ones, not us eh . . . and let me know when you receive the wire transfer. If there is anything we can do, our lives and money and everything are at your service.”
While all this was going on, the Adhamis were on Medicaid despite having their own stores and plenty of money to send to terrorists.
A Slidell man who declined to be identified said he remembers the day federal agents raided their Slidell beauty store last month. The brothers also own a beauty store in Hammond.
Two stores. Terror cash. And hundreds of thousands in Medicaid benefits.
The wives of two Northshore brothers accused of helping funnel money to Hamas have been arrested along with another family member in a separate Medicaid fraud investigation.
The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office accuse the five of defrauding the Louisiana Medicaid program of more than $224,000 in benefits between 2021 and 2025.
Abdel Adhami, 35, and his wife, H.D. Srour, 29, received $113,344 in Medicaid benefits, according to the AG’s Office. They each face five counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.
Omar Adhami, 33, and his wife, Abu Zenah, 28, received $81,099 in Medicaid benefits. They each face three counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.
Their brother, Mohammad I. Adhami, 32, received $30,197 in Medicaid benefits. He faces three counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.
New York has declined 16,070 ICE detainers for illegal aliens accused or convicted of over 50,000 serious crimes since President Donald Trump took office.
“While sanctuary politicians continue to release dangerous criminals onto their streets, our brave law enforcement officers will continue to risk their lives to arrest these heinous criminals and make America safe again. Illegal aliens have no sanctuary in America,” said DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. “We enforce these laws with no help from Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul. The Trump Administration is committed to protecting the American people in every city and every state, and we won’t let sanctuary politicians stand in our way. If you’re a state or local politician, your best bet is to cooperate with us so we can all make America safe again.”
Those crimes include murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault:
Homicides: 131
Kidnappings: 132
Sexual offenses: 1,017
DUIs: 1,561
Burglaries: 1,631
Robberies: 1,776
Weapons offenses: 2,198
Dangerous drugs: 4,324
Assaults: 9,502
The ICE detainers ask local and state law enforcement to hold illegal aliens for 48 hours so agents can take custody of them.
But sanctuary states like New York and sanctuary cities like New York City brush off any cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Two illegal aliens, Dangelo Rafael Jean Caraballo and Sneider Mejia Bautista, allegedly stabbed an NYPD detective on October 2.
Both men have a lengthy rap sheet.
Local law enforcement released Caraballo after his December 2024 arrest for possession of burglar’s tools before ICE could lodge a detainer.
ICE lodged a detainer for Bautista after his October 2025 arrest for criminal possession of a weapon. The NYPD declined the detainer and released him.
Caraballo and Bautista ran to Massachusetts, another sanctuary state, for cover. Both were caught and arrested, but it’s unclear whether New York will hand them over to ICE.
Hochul signed her sanctuary state bill in May 2026. The law bars ICE agents from public places, and local law enforcement cannot cooperate with ICE.
Most public employees also cannot interact with federal immigration authorities unless they present a judicial warrant.
Hochul expanded her anti-ICE agenda in August with the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, which bans local law enforcement from entering or maintaining any agreements with ICE.
In February, Mamdani signed an executive order to strengthen sanctuary laws in New York City.
Trump should flood New York with ICE agents and dare Hochul to arrest them.
Finally: “Feds Raid Ilhan Omar’s DC Home As Immigration Fraud Investigation Heats Up.”
Federal agents raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) early Monday morning as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Somali-born congresswoman’s immigration paperwork, according to Fox News.
The pre-dawn operation began around 6 a.m., with multiple agents wearing Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) jackets observed outside the residence. Two sources close to the investigation told Fox News that authorities are examining immigration documents completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.
Snip.
As Jonathan Turley previously noted, Homan confirmed that federal authorities were examining allegations involving the Minnesota Democrat.
The controversy centers in part on longstanding claims that Omar married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, to facilitate an immigration benefit – allegations Omar has repeatedly denied and which have not been established as fact.
Turley examined whether the allegations could support a fraud case or instead amounted to potentially defamatory accusations, and noted that the statute of limitations could complicate any prosecution involving events dating back many years.
A new federal report finds “irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against” conservatives, religious organizations and lawful businesses because of their political beliefs or activities.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released the results of its investigation into the nine largest banks it supervises in a 47-page report on Wednesday. Those banks include JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank and BMO Bank.
The revelations in the report include allegations that JPMorgan Chase’s former payment processor WePay closed accounts belonging to merchants selling Trump and Make America Great Again merchandise after the bank’s screening system apparently flagged phrases including “MAGA,” “Make America Great,” and “America First.”
The report also accuses WePay of closing accounts associated with conservative religious organizations, including one that was labeled an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
PNC, meanwhile, allegedly denied a line of credit to a media company after employees argued the company’s conservative owners had expressed opinions “very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values.”
Wells Fargo pushed a payment processor to debank a religious nonprofit over its opposition to same-sex marriage, and also declined loans to firearms businesses amid concerns about potential Biden administration pressure, the report found.
The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against California and two election officials, seeking to prevent approximately 20,000 potentially ineligible voters from having their ballots counted in November’s midterm elections until their citizenship status can be verified.
The Justice Department alleges that California is knowingly allowing noncitizens to participate in federal elections, raising concerns about election integrity just weeks before voters head to the polls.
“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.
“If found responsible in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated laws that protect our nation’s representative system of government,” Blanche added.
According to the lawsuit, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators identified potentially ineligible voters using federal immigration records and information from the Social Security Administration and State Department.
The Justice Department previously sent Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan a password-protected drive containing more than 20,000 voter records, demanding citizenship verification within 48 hours.
Logan responded that his office would follow applicable federal and state election laws while maintaining accurate voter registration records.
The administration is now asking a federal court to prevent ballots associated with those voters from being counted until their eligibility is established.
Democrats will use every opportunity to get illegal alien votes into the ballot box.
Result? “Russian bot traffic decimated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes knock multiple Yandex data centers offline.” You know, Comrade Cartridge has been pretty quiet since August…
Abdul El-Seyed’s surrogate Hasan Piker: “I don’t give a fuck what Black people care about. Let’s go back to a better time, when lynchings were happening.”
1.4 million black people live in Michigan. https://t.co/EiEsKuuyrd
Does anyone doubt that if a white conservative “joked” about lynching black people the media would turn it into a full-in, front page onslaught to cancel him?
Former State Department official Mike Benz laid out USAID’s sweeping involvement in Brazil’s political and institutional landscape, detailing a network of American funding that reached media organizations, universities, activist groups and organizations involved with the country’s election system.
Benz, who serves as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, broke down the extent of USAID’s footprint during an appearance on “The Benny Show” with host Benny Johnson.
“What’s happening in Brazil was a full-on Truman show. You had the media funded by USAID. You had the universities funded by USAID. You had the staffers of the Supreme Court and the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), the election court, USAID. You had all the constitutional law advocates funded by USAID. You had the LGBT activists funded by USAID,” Benz explained.
“It’s full spectrum. If you were to walk down a city block in Sao Paulo or, I don’t know, Brasilia, you would have a 360 vision of institutions funded and puppeteered by USAID without ever knowing it,” the former State Department official added. “In fact, USAID, knowing what they were doing, and I need to be careful about what I can and can’t say here, let’s just say, would anyone be surprised, for example, if USAID was going around and telling its grantees in Brazil to remove the USAID logo so that it doesn’t get out that grantee’s connection to USAID?”
Benz said USAID’s influence could continue even after its funding disappeared because institutional and legal changes remained in place.
“They knew what they were doing. They knew how sensitive it was. Would you be surprised, for example, if USAID, which basically set up the censorship state in Brazil, and this is actually something, let me quickly pivot to say, it is true that this is the first Brazilian election since the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil that does not have USAID money slushing around Lula and his allies, but is still an election that is in many ways under the thumb of the ghost of USAID,” he said. “There is something I call kind of the clockmaker’s dilemma, which is USAID, even when you remove it, the institutional and legal changes that a country goes through can live on even if you cut USAID funding down to zero.”
Benz then zeroed in on two of Brazil’s most powerful institutions, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and Superior Electoral Court (TSE): “For example, in Brazil, you have this apparatus through the STF and TSE, the Supreme Court and the basically election court that determines all things around elections, and basically after Bolsonaro won in 2018, the TSE court with Alexandre de Moraes, the famous Voldemort judge, they declared disinformation a threat to free and fair elections, not just disinformation during an election season, but disinformation any time, misinformation, disinformation any time about anything because it could pollute people’s, I don’t know, sense of what’s true or false in the information ecosystem, and so it could have an impact on an election three years away if this false information is allowed to circulate online.”
Benz also went into detail about USAID’s connections to Brazil’s election and judicial establishment.
“That was set up by USAID, USAID flooded the zone, USAID had contact at every level with the TSE court, with the Alexandre de Moraes court,” he said. “I testified to the Brazilian Senate Relations Committee and put pictures from USAID’s website of Alexandre de Moraes being trained by CEPS (Competitive Economy Program), the USAID grantee, by NED (National Endowment for Democracy), the USAID grantee has gotten $3 billion from USAID and was created by the Central Intelligence Agency.”
So American taxpayers were footing the bill for the suborning of democracy in favor of leftwing control and censorship.
“Days after federal agents stopped an 18-year-old of Somali descent from buying an AK-47 to kill dozens at the Mall of America in an ISIS-inspired plot, another 18-year-old Somali is free after police say he opened fire outside a high school homecoming game.”
Investigators linked the Eden Prairie shooting to rival Somali gangs. The accused spent just two nights in jail before posting a $100,000 bond with $10,000 cash down. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty had said he would be held accountable.
On October 2, during Eden Prairie High School’s homecoming football game against Minnetonka, a fight involving about 10 people broke out in a parking lot after two vehicles arrived. Surveillance video showed a Hyundai Sonata, registered to the brother of Adam Abdihakeem Adam, 18, of St. Louis Park, enter the area.
harging documents state Adam was the only occupant. He got out, fired a single shot, struck two teenagers, and fled. The victims were an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old, both Somali males from St. Paul known to law enforcement and not students at either school. One was shot through the leg; the other in the foot. Both injuries were non-life-threatening. The stadium was evacuated and the game postponed.
Investigators used phone location data that tracked Adam and the vehicle before, during, and after the shooting. He abandoned the phone and changed its number. A search of his home recovered clothing consistent with what the shooter wore on video.
Eden Prairie police arrested him without incident on October 8 in Minneapolis with help from partner agencies. Police Chief Matt Sackett said, “The arrest today is an important step in this investigation. I’m incredibly proud of our officers and investigators who have worked nonstop alongside our law enforcement partners to identify those responsible and hold them accountable.”
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged Adam with two counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of second-degree riot while armed with a dangerous weapon. She stated: “This was an alarming and dangerous act that injured two people and frightened many more. Mr. Adam will be held accountable.” She added, “Violence in our communities is completely unacceptable and it requires a professional, coordinated response, which happened here.”
Bail was set at $100,000 and Adam posted bond and was released on October 10.
For years, Welcoming America has been building a campaign to sell rural communities on immigration—training local leaders, supporting public events and teaching advocates how to change their neighbors’ minds.
Its own rural refugee toolkit describes the role of local media plainly:
“a positive force for changing public opinion”
The same guide praises storytelling used to:
“celebrate the demographic change of the community.”
“reshape the narrative about immigrants in new destination states”
“Trump Admin has Arrested 1,296 Tren de Aragua Gang Members. The admin has charged almost 350 members and associates with federal crimes.”
“President Trump created the Homeland Security Task Force to eradicate gangs, cartels, and transnational criminal organizations who entered the United States, and operated with impunity, as a result of the Biden administration’s disastrous open border policies,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Washington Examiner. “Our message to Tren de Aragua and all the transnational criminal organizations is simple: we will dismantle your networks, seize your profits, and put the safety of the American people first. The days of vicious gangs, like TdA, profiting off of the death of American citizens is over.”
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order forming the Homeland Security Task Forces with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).
“The objective of each HSTF is to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States, dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States,” according to the executive order.
The data runs from January 20, 2025, to October 8, 2026. The task force has nabbed 1,296 Trn de Aragua members and charged almost 350 members and associates with federal crimes.
“President Trump’s Homeland Security Task Forces have encountered TdA gang members [in] almost every state,” an ICE spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Washington Examiner. “This is one of the most vicious gangs on planet earth. They rape, maim, and murder for sport.”
“Months after opening, workers at Obama’s presidential center are unionizing due to horrid job conditions.”
Nearly four months after the Obama Presidential Center opened, workers are organizing a union, citing “increasing workloads” and benefit rollbacks that have stirred concerns about their future with the organization.
Fifteen weeks working for Barack H. Obama and these folks have gone full Newsies. 😂
If the Barack Obama library is an unpleasant place to work, you won’t find me surprised. In any event, here’s what the library’s workers have alleged:
They are facing “increasing workloads.” That’s, um, sort of to be expected in the weeks after a major new facility opens and everyone’s still figuring out what work needs to be done. But okay.
They have “seen our benefits rolled back.” After just four months? That was quick! But I guess even the Obamacare Machine realized that offering full insurance to part-time administrative workers wasn’t financially feasible.
“Support from leadership,” meanwhile, has been “minimal.” Concerns about working conditions have been met with “vague responses.”
This unbearable, horrific working environment has contributed to a high turnover rate.
The workers have announced that they are forming a labor coalition, Obama Workers United, with AFSCME Council 31.
San Francisco’s Democratic mayor, Daniel Lurie, says he’s a proud progressive, but in a recent interview, Lurie acknowledged to CNN’s Dana Bash that on issues like crime, homelessness, drug use, housing, and affordability, the city getting “so entrapped in our progressive values” caused it to lose its way and go down the wrong path.
Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir with no political experience, was elected in November 2024, defeating the much better-known incumbent Democratic mayor, London Breed, in part because he promised to clean up the drug-infested streets and be tougher on crime.
In one situation from October 2025 that got a lot of national attention, Lurie was able to convince President Trump to back off sending a “surge” of National Guard troops into the city to help combat crime, successfully arguing to allow local law enforcement to work to turn things around in “continued partnerships” with the FBI, ATF, etc.:
“We have work to do, and we would welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Attorney to get drugs and drug dealers off our streets, but having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery,” he added. “We appreciate that the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong.”
In the CNN interview, Lurie noted that there was nothing progressive about overdose deaths, car break-ins, women feeling unsafe walking to their cars, and local businesses having to close because of repeat offenders.
Lurie’s social justice comrades have decided those are precisely the outcomes they desire…
Brandon Herrera’s 23rd Congressional District Democrat opponent Katy Stout isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. “Texas Democrat accidentally blasts opponent for ‘making fun of Nazis’ during live debate.” And if there’s ever been an apt last name…
Lennar and Millrose have a human centipede home selling ecosystem. Lennar makes the homes and owns Millrose, who buys the homes to rent out. And mysteriously helped Lennar hit their quarterly home-sale numbers.
At least he was ambitious. “ICE to deport illegal alien who pretended to be part of DHS and sold deportation “immunity” cards to other illegal aliens.”
[Mario Cesar Dos Santos Jr.] Brazilian illegal immigrant who admitted to creating a fake branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and selling counterfeit DHS and FBI identification cards — which he claimed would provide immunity from federal immigration officers — has been ordered deported …
As part of the scheme, Dos Santos claimed to be the president of the ‘Chaplain Emergency Management Agency’ (CEMA), a fictitious federal agency he created to trick attendees at training seminars into paying for immunity from immigration enforcement.
While the training courses were offered for free, participants were charged $400 to $450 for bogus certificates they believed would protect them from deportation, authorities said. Each seminar drew approximately 30 to 45 participants.
In the UK, of course. “Fifteen-Year-Old Boy Is Arrested After Joking About How A Politician Dresses.”
The leader of the Conservative Party on the Wolverhampton City Council, Simon Bennett, apparently can take anything but fashion criticism. The politician reportedly called the police on a 15-year-old boy for mocking his clothing style at meetings. It is the latest example of the collapse of free speech in the United Kingdom.
A boy only identified as “Fraser” is a 15-year-old supporter of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. He found himself searched and arrested by four officers from the West Midlands Police at his home, locked in a cell, fingerprinted, subjected to a DNA search, and taken for a mugshot. The police then searched his bedroom and telephone.
All of this was over his joking about how Bennett dressed in public.
“Georgia Bought a $954,578 Chevy, but Officials Won’t Say What’s Inside.” “Records obtained through Georgia’s open-records law show that Georgia purchased a 2026 Traverse in April from Hardy Chevrolet GMC. Its listed “TSE cellular communications package” cost $890,478.80, with another $25,394 for installation. The rest went to equipment officials won’t identify publicly, even as state lawmakers question whether a child-welfare agency should have technology normally associated with criminal investigations.”
The Center Square reported last month how the department spent $639,000 on four other police-grade technologies that surveil web activity, extract the contents of cell phones and track cell phone locations. The prospect of the department spending nearly $1 million more on yet another surveillance tool—one that’s mobile and far more invasive—has lawmakers raising Fourth Amendment concerns, the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
“They are not a law enforcement agency, and my understanding is that that type of equipment is only supposed to go to law enforcement agencies,” state Rep. Beth Camp, R-Concord, told The Center Square after the news wire informed her of the spending. “That is surveillance. That is spy surveillance.”
In the year 1000 A.D. an unbiased world observer would never have picked Europe as the region that would dominate the globe. Probably they would pick China with its massive population or fabulously wealthy India. The Islamic Caliphate would have looked past its sell-by date but would have beaten Europe by a mile.
Snip.
In this day and age – and particularly on Columbus Day – it is frowned upon to ask these questions. The Powers That Be tell us that Europe got rich by stealing indigenous people’s wealth, conveniently ignoring the many other non-European powers that were much more brutal at doing that than the Europeans were. The Mongol Empire in 1300 would have had poll position for World Domination, as would the earlier Abbasid caliphate. If all it takes for World Domination is to steal other people’s stuff, what was it about Europe that was different?
After all, China invented gunpowder. Why did Europe perfect it? Why did little England perfect the sailing Ship-of-the-Line? Why did the Divergence start and why there?
Today I offer two books for interested readers that explain this. One of these could never be published today, and the author would never get tenure today. Fortunately (if that’s the right word) David Landes is safely dead and doesn’t have to worry about The Usual Suspects getting him denied tenure.
Landes was a big deal in Economic History, authoring the section on the Industrial Revolution in the Cambridge Economic History. Late in his career, perhaps 30 years ago, he wrote The Wealth And Poverty of Nations, an economic history whose title was unashamedly stolen from Adam Smith. Landes insisted that social systems were key, and that some societies allowed progress towards a Great Divergence while other societies stifled attempts towards that progress.
In other words, if your society doesn’t support the right efforts it doesn’t matter how much of other people’s wealth you steal; you’re going nowhere. We see this in the history of Spain which became fabulously wealthy by stealing New World wealth but squandered it, ending up at the bottom of European power rankings. You could say exactly the same thing about the Mongol empire, or the Caliphate.
Landes’ arguments in the book are considered double-plus ungood by the woke crowd, so you might want to pick up a used copy from Amazon. The chapter on Argentina is particularly interesting in this age of President Milei. Interestingly, Milei was an Economist, and may have read Landes’ book.
A second recommendation is less controversal with the woke crowd but is joined at the hip with the Great Divergence. The political cycle world wide has been the emergence of an empire, the collapse of the empire, and the rise of a successor empire. We see this in China, in India, in Mesoamerica.
But not in Europe. Europe only had one great empire, Rome. When it fell, it was not replaced. Walter Scheidel wrote a book exploring why this unusual circumstance happened, Escape From Rome. Using Landes’ analytical framework, the Roman Empire did not encourage the types of behaviors that could have led to an Industrial Revolution, because those behaviors were seen by the Authorities as subversive to the state. But when Rome fell, there were unusual circumstances in Europe that prevented a new empire from rising in its place. Then competition between the poor emerging states set Europe on a very different path from the rest of the world. Basically, Europe escaped from Empire while the rest of the world didn’t.
Read the whole thing.
If you want to list American cities least likely to flood, Las Vegas would seem a good bet (heh), but evidently an inch of rain is enough to turn it into Venice.
“Hitler Mussolini wins Peruvian election.” “Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores has secured a narrow victory in Peru’s local elections, exit polls show. The candidate for the centre-left Ahora Nación party was elected mayor of Queropalca, a remote district in the Peruvian Andes.”
Washington State FAed, and now they’re finding out. “Columbia Bank moving top executives to Arizona, citing Washington taxes.”
A major Pacific Northwest bank is shifting some of its top leadership to Arizona.
First reported by The Puget Sound Business Journal, the Columbia Banking System is opening an executive office in the Scottsdale area.
The office will open later this month.
The exodus of Columbia Bank executives began with CEO Clint Stein, who sold his Auburn home (for $2.45 million in September) to relocate to Arizona permanently. According to The Puget Sound Business Journal, the company said new Washington taxes are costing it approximately $8 million a year, prompting the decision to move most executive roles to Arizona.
Democrats love raising taxes more than life itself.
Been an interesting day. While I wasn’t looking, a giant branch cracked and fell onto my driveway. I park in my garage, so nothing was harmed, and it was relatively easy to haul the branch to the other side of the driveway to trim down for trash.
This week: Stephen Green takes a look at fraud in the Los Angeles Homeless Industrial Complex, Minnesota can’t go a week without more reports of Somali fraud and/or violence, Ukraine starts hitting Russian data centers, more of that illegal alien voting fraud that never happens, Ft. Hood jihadi shooter gets a firing squad, Vietnamese man arrested for selling “roof rabbit,” and an all-Lamborghini drag race.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Stephen Green: “You’ll Never Believe How L.A.’s ‘Ambitious Effort’ to Fix Homelessness Totally Failed.” Oh, I bet I can.
Five years ago, a coalition of the usual lefty pressure organizations — public labor unions, progressive activist groups, and “housing advocates” — pushed for a citywide ballot initiative called United to House L.A. or ULA.
Here’s the initiative that made the ballot in 2022: “Shall an ordinance be adopted to add a tax on the sale or transfer of real property valued at over $5 million to fund affordable housing and tenant assistance programs?”
It passed, naturally, because voters like to feel good about themselves for doing their bit to promote “affordable housing and tenant assistance,” while feeling even better about not having to actually pay for any of it. Set a cap at “soak the rich level,” and you’ll be amazed at how altruistic people become with other people’s money.
It was billed as a “mansion tax” to fund low-income housing.
Over at the L.A. Times way back when, staff writer Benjamin Oreskes actually led with “an ambitious effort to address the homelessness crisis,” because the paper wasn’t at all pushing a lefty agenda. No, sir-ee.
Meanwhile, RAND warned in 2022 that “the revenue raised by Measure ULA may disappoint,” pointing to “the city’s Affordable Housing Linkage Fee — a 2018 program that amounts to a tax on new market rate housing construction to fund affordable housing construction — suggested that it would raise $100 million per year. However, the actual revenue to date has been around one third of that amount or lower.”
Supporters claimed the “mansion tax” would raise $900 million a year, or $2.7 billion over its first three years. “Instead,” the New York Post reported this weekend, ULA “brought in about $1.2 billion.” That’s less than half the expected revenues, nearly three years after passage.
Snip.
The Post also reported that ULA “blocked the building of 9,100 homes, wiped out 16,650 full-time construction jobs and cost $452 million in revenue.” So ULA might have raised $1.2 billion, but at the cost of nearly half a billion in lost income taxes, and more than 16,000 jobs.
And that affordable housing? Still hasn’t happened: “The City has barely touched the cash, spending just $114 million as of May — less than 10% of the money raised,” the Post reported, but no new affordable housing units have been built.
For Democrats, big pots of money that never get used for their professed purpose is the goal.
Also Stephen Green: “Look Inside the Luxury Tower Housing L.A.’s Homeless Bureaucracy.”
A California-based independent journalist going by InnerRhythmMedia — think of him as Nick Shirley 2.0 — recently looked into the headquarters of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, and what he found looked more like a multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley firm than a joint city-county government project.
Snip.
As broken down by Wall Street Apes on Tuesday, LAHSA “is headquartered in a luxury high rise building where employees enjoy VIP amenities like a fitness center, rock climbing wall, an infrared sauna, a cold plunge, and a helipad.”
And the pay? Oh my, the pay:
Chief Executive Officer, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, $491,908
“The Congressional Budget Office estimates roughly 1 million lawfully present immigrants will lose eligibility for Affordable Care Act subsidies by 2034, while about 100,000 could lose Medicare coverage. The Center for Medicare Advocacy says some Medicare terminations are expected Feb. 1, 2027.” Good. People shouldn’t move to America to go on welfare.
“FBI thwarts ‘Minnesota man’s’ jihadi plot to shoot up Mall of America.” “‘Minnesota man’ Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud was apparently looking to shoot up America’s most famous shopping mall.” Why, it’s almost like importing unassimilated Somalis into the American heartland has negative consequences…
The ATF admits that the ruling in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF applies to everyone.
Effective October 9, 2026, ATF will no longer require individuals to seek ATF approval under the NFA before making or transferring short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, silencers, and “any other weapon[s]” as defined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(e). ATF will also no longer require such items to be registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. These policies apply uniformly to anyone otherwise subject to these requirements, not just to the plaintiffs.
However, it’s not all sunshine, silencers and kittens: “The injunction does not disturb the NFA’s application to machineguns and destructive devices. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act maintained the $200 tax on such items. Consequently, all NFA provisions still apply to machineguns and destructive devices.” And state laws for the same items still apply. (Hat tip: Gun Owners of America.)
“Iran’s Economy ‘Deteriorating Rapidly,’ Regime’s National Security Chief Rezaei Admits. Iran’s currency hits new historic low, trading at 2.7 million rials to the dollar.”
The Iranian economy is “rapidly deteriorating” under the weight of President Donald Trump’s Operation Economic Outcast, the regime’s national security chief Mohsen Rezaei said. The admission comes six weeks after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent launched a sweeping sanctions campaign to cut off the regime’s global commercial and financial access.
Since President Donald Trump threatened Tehran with an “Economic D-Day” in August, the regime has struggled to break the U.S. naval blockade or find buyers for its oil. “This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY, and we need all of our Allies to stand with the United States of America to isolate, and defeat, the Iran threat,” he wrote on Truth Social in August. “These maniacs are on the ropes, and these HISTORIC MEASURES will cripple them and their ability to project terror worldwide.”
Just months after boasting that Iran would ‘neutralize’ U.S. sanctions, Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad has been forced to leave the office. “Iran’s oil minister has resigned days after allegations that an intermediary trust selling Iranian oil abroad owed millions of dollars’ worth of export receipts to the state,” The Guardian reported on Monday. “Mohsen Paknejad’s departure comes as Iran grapples with a dire economic situation, including inflation running at 85%.”
The Mullahs would rather the Iranian people starve their give up their dreams of nuclear weapons.
“Ukraine Attacks Key Pumping Station Near Moscow.” “This is connected by product pipelines to the Ryazan and Moscow oil refineries, and then also connects the major airports of the Moscow region.”
“Followup: “Su-34 and Su-35 Confirmed Destroyed At Khanskaya Air Base.”
Interesting development: Montenegro detained “Mikhail Zvinchuk, the founder of the pro-war Russian military-blogger network Rybar, along with his wife and three associates. Rybar often supports Russia’s war aims while reporting battlefield weaknesses that the Russian Defense Ministry downplays, including Ukrainian strikes on supply routes serving occupied Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea…Zvinchuk is under UK and EU sanctions and is on a U.S. wanted list tied to alleged election interference.”
Remember that Top Gear episodes where the lads tried their hands at driving 18-wheelers, and Jeremy Clarkson drove to the finish line blithely unaware his rig had caught fire? Well, thanks to a Ukrainian drone, a Russian truck driver just recreated that scene in Crimea.
More than 1,600 convictions have been secured by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Child Exploitation Unit as part of its efforts to combat online predators and child pornography.
According to figures released Tuesday by the Office of the Attorney General, the unit has made 278 arrests for online solicitation of a minor, resulting in 214 convictions. Another 610 arrests for possession of child pornography have resulted in 1,410 convictions. Numerous cases remain pending.
The figures were released as part of an update on the attorney general’s law enforcement operations.
Snip.
Paxton’s Human Trafficking Unit has separately made 373 arrests and secured 126 convictions, with several cases still pending.
The attorney general also announced that the office’s Fugitive Apprehension Unit has now made 18,291 arrests since its inception, including 68 individuals on the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Top 10 Most Wanted List.
“‘Worst of the worst‘: Latest ICE roundup nabs pedophiles, animal abusers.”
“Yesterday, the brave patriots of ICE arrested pedophiles, animal abusers, drug traffickers, and other public safety threats from our communities,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement. “Even while facing a more than 1,600% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line, ICE will not be deterred. Illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S. We will find you, arrest you, and remove you from our nation.”
Topping the Wednesday roundup was Edis Canales-Montoya of Honduras, who was convicted of sexual conduct against a child.
Gonzalo Sanchez of Mexico was convicted for possession of child pornography and driving under the influence.
Carlos Arturo Zelaya-Argueta of El Salvador was convicted of sexual abuse of an animal and drug distribution.
Manuel Gomez-Lopez of Guatemala was convicted for the manufacture/delivery of a controlled substance.
Jesus Garcia-Serrano of Mexico was convicted for obstructing a criminal investigation and for unlawful possession of handguns.
That thing that never happens happened again. “Federal grand jury indicts 10 immigrants in Minnesota for illegally voting in US elections.”
Today we are announcing that a federal grand jury returned an indictment against 10 foreign nationals who have committed unlawful voting and registration offenses in the state of Minnesota. In total, the grand jury’s indictments include 9 counts of illegal voting by an alien, and 9 counts of making a false claim of citizenship in order to register to vote.
Charges include illegally voting in the general elections of 2022, 2024, and the primary elections of this year, of August 2026.
The defendants that have been charged include foreign nationals from Brazil, Ghana, and Liberia.
MS NOW’s Morning Joe aired the second installment of its midterm series, “The Voter Files,” on Tuesday. Network contributor Elise Jordan spoke with a panel of black voters from Wayne County, Michigan, who had backed Rep. Haley Stevens in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. Their remarks did not bode well for Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.
The consensus was that the far-left El-Sayed has wrongly taken black support for granted. Panelists said he assumes that because black voters typically vote Democratic, they would set aside their reservations, and vote for him — no outreach required.
One woman noted, “I think he’s taken advantage that we, as black people, are Democratic, and he thinks we’re gonna vote for him anyway, and I’m like, ‘No sir.’”
“I’m gonna have to put uncommitted down on that little circle and move on,” she added. “If you’re going to Congress to represent me, I need you to talk about what’s going on in this community.”
Another woman on the panel felt El-Sayed had missed opportunities to let black people know who he is. “We don’t understand him,” she said. “We don’t know him.”
I wonder how much resentment is based on the unspoken assumption that he’ll be directing graft to Muslims rather than blacks…
The Department of War (DOW) issued a press release September 29 announcing the latest change the Trump administration is making at U.S. service academies, including West Point and the Naval Academy. In order to keep the academies “laser-focused on lethality and readiness,” there will no longer be any civilians appointed to tenured positions at the academies.
“This directly addresses the critical issues of academic stagnation and complacency that are often associated with tenure, and which threaten to dilute the academies’ primary focus on warfighting and tactical dominance,” the DOW press release argued.
This will necessitate a major hiring adjustment, and I would not be at all surprised if the Trump administration ends up in court over this simply because judges seem to interfere with everything this administration does, particularly if it undercuts bloated bureaucracy
“Death by U.S. Army Firing Squad Approved for 2009 Fort Hood Gunman.” “Nidal Malik Hasan, a former U.S. Army psychiatrist, was convicted on 13 counts of premeditated murder in 2013 after he fired at soldiers and one civilian inside the Soldier Readiness Center, a medical facility, on the west side of the U.S. Army base on November 5, 2009. Hasan caused 13 deaths and injured 32 others before being shot and captured alive, although he was paralyzed from the waist down as a result.” I don’t think they’ll have any problem getting soldiers to volunteer for the firing squad.
President Donald Trump weighed in on France’s ongoing school protest crisis on Tuesday, arguing that the unrest reflected broader concerns about immigration and integration.
In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!”
Conservatives have only been warning about unassimilated Muslims in the French banlieues since the 1990s…
“Quebec Elects Separatists Vowing To Break From Canada.” Well, that will come in handy 30 years or so hence to resettle French natives fleeing the new Paris Caliphate…
TSMC planning to build a fab in Texas? This is speculative and preliminary, and Musk has already denied TSMC will help run Terafab, but the move makes a lot of economic sense for both parties. Plus fabs employ a whole lot more people than data centers.
Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner interview William Shatner. Not always geared to my interests, but there are some nuggets. And holy crap, Shatner looks great for someone who’s 95.
The Honest Trailer for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Dwight sent over this story about a formerly pregnant tranny “man” who got mag-dumped by his inlaws (“who took turns shooting him”), but trying to make sense of it just made my brain hurt.
A reminder not to get black-pilled, another Supreme Court win for deporting illegal alien felons, San Francisco’s government offers pedos a veritable buffet, Rockefeller money is going to the ChiComs, and another deeply technical video on semiconductor processes you won’t click on.
Yes, I want to believe, but there’s evidence supporting hope. There’s evidence supporting the idea that the polls are so substantially flawed that they do not accurately reflect what’s going to happen. Again, the caveat – this could be delusion. We could be seeing what we want to see. But then, what we’re seeing is there. There is evidence supporting what we want to happen, evidence worth considering.
We’re seeing how polls have been missing big lately. Look at Abdul El-Sayed. He was supposed to win that Michigan primary in a walk. We’re talking five, 10, 15 points, according to the primary polls. And yet he barely squeaked past that squeaky woman he was competing with. We’ve seen lots of other polls that assured us of a Democrat victory. Just ask President Harris about that.
If you’ve been around a while, you know that the polls always favor the Democrats. You almost never see a Democrat surprise us by exceeding his polling against a Republican. You just don’t. So, there’s that. And of course, there’s an interest in driving down Republican enthusiasm by telling people they can’t win.
Then there’s the gut vibe. Don’t completely disregard that. In Texas, you must believe the Texans are going to support a blasphemous, anti-meat, anti-gun, anti-white, woke weirdo with a thing for trans kids. Does that sound like Texas to you? It sure doesn’t sound like Texas to me, and I’m in Texas. I’ve talked to a lot of Texan conservatives. Not one thinks this guy is going to win. Now, they agree it could theoretically happen, but they don’t think it’s going to. Ken Paxton has won three times in statewide races, and he’s done a lot of great conservative things. Are Texans really going to choose a bizarre homunculus to spend six years in Washington, D.C., voting like Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) in their name? It just doesn’t fit. It’s weird. That’s not saying it couldn’t happen – there are lots of communists here along with other weirdos, losers, and mutations who would be thrilled to have this geebo as a Lone Star senator. But it just doesn’t feel like something that’s going to happen.
Moreover, we’ve been told a lot of conservatives are going to sit this out. The bots on X are certainly pushing that coordinated message, as the semi-coherent comments on my Monday column about quitters demonstrate. Yes, there are probably some Republicans who are going to sit out this midterm, but I haven’t met any of them personally. Maybe you have. I just don’t think there are a lot of them, especially in light of how appalling the Democrats are. It doesn’t make sense, at least to people who aren’t idiots who blame everything on Epstein conspiracies and the Jews and blah blah blah, to be mad at Trump and the Republicans for not being conservative enough and showing them what-for by allowing the election of communists. As risky as it is, I’m not going all-in on the assumption that people are that stupid.
Read the whole thing, and encourage all your sane friends to show up at the polls in November.
Dr. Anthony Fauci privately sounded the alarm when he learned the U.S. Army had conducted an experiment a decade ago that aerosolized the lethal Ebola virus, which is not normally transmitted by air, and then shared the results publicly amid an ongoing outbreak in Africa, according to diary entries obtained by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul.
The then-top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease was particularly concerned in 2016 that the Army medical research arm’s experiment seemed to show that exposure to aerosolized Ebola caused more damaging effects in subjects that had been vaccinated. This was almost four years before he championed shutting down the U.S. economy and social life over the COVID-19 virus outbreak.
Fauci wrote he believed such research should be kept secret, preferably classified, so that it didn’t undermine public confidence in vaccination in the African countries suffering an outbreak of the virus.
“What idiots those guys at USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] are,” Fauci wrote in a March 2016 diary entry. “This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place.”
Why yes, “undermining public confidence in vaccination” is a far bigger concern than the fact that the U.S. Army under Obama was committing an actual war crime.
It’s Tuesday morning at Little Learners Daycare in downtown San Francisco. Teacher Wendy herds bright-eyed toddlers, amped up after playtime in the courtyard, back inside. They’re laughing and swatting at each other playfully, oblivious to the pack of pedophiles lurking nearby.
Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex offenders live at 111 Taylor Street. Wendy knew that the Tenderloin, where she operates her Mandarin-immersion daycare, was dangerous. It’s a hotbed for illegal drug activity and homelessness. But she didn’t realize that sex offenders live so close to her daycare—or that taxpayers fund their housing.
Pedophiles, illegal aliens; the only people Democrats don’t like paying for housing for is law-abiding American citizens.
According to this City Journal investigation, more than 25 percent of sex offenders in San Francisco with addresses in the Megan’s Law database live in taxpayer-subsidized buildings. Many live near a park, school, or daycare, or reside in a neighborhood with a high concentration of children. They do all of this despite statewide efforts to ban concentrating pedophiles so close to children. Instead of listening to California voters, San Francisco has become a taxpayer-funded dumping ground for sex criminals.
The Taylor Street Center is one of San Francisco’s most heavily populated sex-offender residences. Located in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street houses at least 31 registered sex offenders. The taxpayer-funded California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons contract the private GEO Group to run the facility.
The reentry complex can house 240 people. It hosts specialized programs for residents like “cultural diversity education,” “gender-responsive groups,” and a “weekly meditation group.” The facility sits just 400 feet from a daycare center, 1,000 feet from a fourth-to-eighth-grade school, and five blocks away from a preschool.
Any sex offender housed in the Tenderloin is bound to encounter children. Along with having a high concentration of immigrant and low-income households, the neighborhood also has the highest concentration of kids in the entire city.
I’m sure the sex offenders call that “the buffet.”
President Trump invoked a rare and legally contested power Friday to cancel $810 million in congressionally approved spending, targeting programs for illegal immigrants and a slate of federal initiatives explicitly organized around race and DEI.
The request hits 11 funding pools at seven departments and agencies. It also landed with just five days left in the fiscal year. That’s the point of the disputed “pocket rescission” maneuver: the money runs out before Congress gets its normal 45 days to consider the cuts.
The biggest piece is $567 million at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for services to refugees, asylees, unaccompanied minors, and other non-citizens.
The White House called them “pro-illegal immigration programs” and said the money is no longer needed because illegal border crossings have fallen sharply.
But immigration spending was only part of the package.
Several of the rescissions hit programs explicitly organized around race or ethnicity.
The administration wants to rescind $10 million from the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, which helps minority-owned businesses. The White House pointed to a 2024 federal court ruling that found the agency’s presumption of social disadvantage based on race or ethnicity unconstitutional.
Another $5 million would come from HHS’s Office of Minority Health.
The White House highlighted grants from that office addressing racial trauma among black youth, health disparities among black and Latino youth, a George Washington University fellowship promoting health equity and DEI, and a $1.5 million project addressing the effects of redlining and structural racism.
HUD housing counseling takes a much larger hit, with $56 million targeted.
The administration said the program had funded groups including UnidosUS, the National Urban League, and Housing Action Illinois, criticizing their work on structural racism, racial justice, and other DEI priorities.
Then there is the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, slated to lose $15 million.
The office’s mission included “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions” and restoring racial stability. The Trump administration shut it down earlier this year and now accuses the office of promoting critical race theory and gender ideology rather than carrying out that mission.
The package goes beyond those programs.
The administration identified $28 million in HHS research funding it wants canceled, pointing to grants involving transgender health care, racial disparities, and a $50,000 project to develop a research agenda addressing racism in emergency medicine. Another $70 million would be pulled from international education programs, including programs the White House said had funded research involving queer and transgender issues abroad.
Other cuts include $25 million for migrant student programs, $25 million across two DHS programs providing services or legal assistance to non-citizens, and $9 million for a Treasury program providing debt relief to foreign countries in exchange for conservation commitments.
Now we need to hand out pink slips to the people who were administering these programs.
Long overdue: “Education Dept. Officially Removes Biden’s Title IX Gender Identity Rules. In other words, the department is sticking to the literal interpretation of Title IX: sex-based discrimination.”
The Education Department has officially rescinded the Biden Administration’s Title IX interpretation that extended protections to students based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In other words, the department is sticking to Title IX’s literal meaning: sex-based discrimination.
“Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.”
Honestly, nothing changes because the department has been enforcing reality since January 2025: Title IX is based on sex. It’s not based on your sexual orientation or gender identity.
Somehow, the people who tell us that they were “born this way” and that “sexuality is a spectrum” are now returning to normal. It’s almost like the whole “acceptance” movement was just a social contagion that spread because teens like being rebellious!
The Supreme Court majority (6-3) has granted the DOJ request to put on hold a Boston-based US District Judge ruling that DHS policy to remove illegal aliens to so-called third countries is unlawful. The process of rapid deportation will continue while the matter is called before the Supreme Court for oral arguments in December (ruling in ’27).
The Usual Suspects opposed deporting the Democrat Party’s precious illegal alien felons.
Former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed at least 4,782 political donations to President Donald Trump from Americans across the country between September 2019 and August 2023, Senator Chuck Grassley revealed during a Tuesday hearing featuring the former special counsel.
The checks — which Smith’s team acquired as part of their election case against Trump, dubbed “Arctic Frost” — contained donors’ personal information, including their home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures. Some of the subpoenaed donations were for as little as $1. Grassley revealed the evidence while questioning Smith during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing and followed up with a press release containing further details.
During former President Joe Biden’s administration, Smith brought two cases against Trump: The first accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and the second involved him keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Smith resigned from his position nine days before Trump was sworn in as president again; both cases against Trump have been dismissed.
As part of the FBI’s investigation into the 2020 election, agents accessed toll records, which show who a given individual spoke with on the phone but not the contents of their calls, for 16 members of Congress. He also subpoenaed records from 87 Trump White House phones, which captured records from calls between government sources and dozen of news outlets.
The political donations Grassley described were obtained as part of Smith’s investigation, which focused on whether Trump defrauded donors by raising money under the false pretext that the resulting donations would help Trump’s team overturn the results of the 2020 election.
All the easier to compile an enemies list should Democrats retake power…
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a $1.4 billion U.S.-based charity with funding from the Rockefeller family and other donors, has forged a “dangerous partnership with Communist China” and is pouring millions of dollars into China-based nonprofits that are advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy goals.
That’s one of the findings in a new report, “The Rockefeller Network: How the Rockefeller Family Turned Their Oil Fortune into Extreme Climate Activism,” out today from Americans for Public Trust, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative watchdog organization. The report, an advance copy of which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, outlines how the billion-dollar fortune of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., who died in 1937, is being used “to quietly bankroll numerous radical and leftist projects.”
Snip.
“An alarming amount—well into the millions—has found its way directly into the coffers of entities that are either official vestiges of the Chinese government, or directly and irrefutably administered by the CCP and its representatives,” the report says. “And many of these entities, while operating under the guise of ‘green’ and environmental research, are, instead, using these funds to help buttress China’s foreign influence programs around the globe, especially the CCP’s infamous ‘Belt and Road Initiative.'”
Among the grants singled out in the report as most problematic:
— $400,000 between 2020 and 2024 to the Foreign Environment Cooperation Center, “a division of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.”
— Nearly $1.5 million to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, whose “direct ties to the Chinese government are undeniable.”
— Nearly $200,000 to Tsinghua University, which announced in 2024 that the school’s office of the president had merged with the Chinese Communist Party to “form a new Party Committee Office that would run the school.”
Groups that fund the ChiComs should have their non-profit status revoked and their assets seized.
Democrats are always saying the quiet part out loud nowadays.
They aren’t even trying to hide their radical plans to totally replace America’s voters, workers, and people with a cheap labor underclass that disproportionately votes Democrat.
[ U.S. Representative] Democrat Tom Suozzi says his biggest goal in politics is mass amnesty for criminal illegals:
“My biggest goal of what I want to accomplish in politics right now is I want to legalize 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 million people in our country.”
Amnesty was always the end goal for the illegal alien importation.
Obvious: “UK Whistleblower: 99 percent of Asylum Claims Are Fake.”
Only one in 100 asylum claims are genuine, according to a whistleblower who has revealed widespread fraud and dysfunction in the system.
The Home Office official, who has worked for years as a decision-maker on asylum and has assessed thousands of claims, said asylum seekers from certain countries use the “same script” in what he and colleagues describe as “package claims”.
He said he had encountered a large number of Iraqi Kurds claiming asylum who said they had been in a relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan region. The official said it had become a “running joke” among colleagues that the number of Iraqi Kurds who said they were involved with the daughter was in the “hundreds”.
He also said that “hundreds” of claims from Pakistanis were based on the assertion that they were in fear of their lives in their home country because of their gay relationship with the same man who had provided letters supporting their claims.
The source also disclosed suspicions about large numbers of Bangladeshi claimants purporting to be dissidents of the former governing party, which is now banned, even though they were unable to provide basic information about the group.
An 18-year-old woman has been gang raped and beaten by up to ten different men, many of them with a Syrian background, in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Although the rape occurred in May 2025, the suspects are only now being arrested. In response to the rape, political leader Geert Wilders wrote that the Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs and called for all the perpetrators to be removed from the country along with their families.
Six suspects have now been arrested, aged 20 to 23. During the incident, the girl, who lived in a residential group home, was driven to two different parking lots and raped by several men, some of whom filmed the assault and shared it on Snapchat. Police say the woman was humiliated and beaten.
And somehow the leaders of UK’s Labour Party say “Yes, we need more of that.”
A plane leaving Dubai and heading towards Tel Aviv almost saw a tragic end as the co-pilot of the plane turned hijacker mid-flight and attempted to take control and crash the plane….
The co-pilot, an Omani national, stabbed the pilot multiple times in an attempt to kill him and hijack the flight. The co-pilot had worked for FlyDubai for around a year.
The injured pilot was able to transmit a radio warning, Israel scrambled fighter jets, and the passengers and crew were able to subdue the attacker in midair.
The plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia to sort the entire mess out.
Be prepared to fight for your life on a moment’s notice, because you might have to.
More long overdue. “Trump expands H-1B visa crackdown, will scrutinize layoffs.”
The Trump administration on Thursday announced an executive order expanding the ongoing crackdown against H-1B visa abuse.
The H-1B is a visa program designed to allow companies to bring in high-skilled workers when no qualified Americans are available. But the program has faced considerable scrutiny in recent years, due to widespread fraud. Critics have argued that major employers also use it as a way to undercut American wages.
Trump’s Thursday order reaffirms the $100,000 application fee he imposed last year, but now mandates inter-agency coordination to consider an employers’s recent or planned layoffs when applying for H-1B visas.
“Our message to corporate America is simple: We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor,” Vice President JD Vance said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 121 individuals during a summer enforcement initiative around Lake Lewisville in Dallas.
The operation, led by ICE’s Dallas field office, began June 27 and concluded over Labor Day weekend. It involved coordination with state and federal agencies, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and focused on identifying individuals unlawfully present in the country, assisting with lake-related investigations, and allowing local officers to devote more resources to boating safety enforcement.
According to ICE’s Friday release, individuals arrested during the initiative had criminal histories involving offenses such as assault, family violence, theft, burglary, sexual assault of a child, driving while intoxicated, and boating while intoxicated.
Among those arrested were two men ICE identified as members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization designated by the U.S. State Department as both a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist group.
Willian Josue Ordonez Vasquez, 24, a Venezuelan national, and Edwin Josue Cabrera-Zelaya, 22, a Honduran national, were under investigation by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for allegedly operating an illegal livery business on Lake Lewisville.
I must say that I’ve never run into “illegal livery business” before, but it seems to involve not complying with Texas regulations on powered boat rental.
Man bites dog: “Too extreme for Newsom? California sanctuary bill for abortion, transgender procedures vetoed.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom used his veto pen to make out-of-state prosecutions theoretically possible for both “reproductive health care services” and “gender affirming health care services.”
The term-limited Democrat with presidential ambitions, who recently said he won’t run if fellow Californian and former Democratic nominee Kamala Harris enters the 2028 presidential race, vetoed legislation (AB 2164) to codify an extradition ban for “legally protected health care activity” in California, claiming it infringed executive authority.
Ignore the blather about Harris, Governor Hairgel is obviously running.
Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.
Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.
And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.
They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.
One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.
The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.
The AI didn’t just win. It embarrassed the institution.
Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.
They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.
And they did it in less time.
Let that sink in.
A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.
Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.
This study just proved both of those moats are gone.
When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.
Yeah, but can AI forge friendships with the spawn of rich people, the primary purpose of so many attending the Ivy League? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A Detroit pastor who last year admonished a parishioner for her inadequate church donation of $1,235 was paid a salary of $538,955 that year by a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he leads that is separate from the church, according to federal records.
That salary for Marvin Winans Sr. — the pastor of Perfecting Church and a Grammy-winning gospel singer — accounted for about 61% of what the nonprofit spent toward its stated mission of “community development,” its recent report to the Internal Revenue Service shows.
His role as president for the nonprofit — Perfecting Community Development Corporation — is a half-time job, the report says, which means he was paid about $518 per hour.
Nice work if you can get it.
Winans’ salary has increased substantially in recent years and coincided with a $500,000 government grant the state awarded the nonprofit. Grant application guidance indicates the award was funded with federal pandemic relief money.
Of course it was.
Seems like Pastor Winans was far more concerned with fat stacks than flocks…
Another terror plot thwarted. “Suspect Arrested for Alleged Thwarted Capitol Attack Now in Federal Custody. Benny Caldera, Jr. was released from the Bexar County Jail into federal custody.”
A man was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Texas State Capitol in Austin early in the morning of Wednesday, September 30.
The attack was allegedly set to occur on October 1.
Forty-year-old Benny Caldera, Jr., of Converse, was arrested by a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) SWAT team, according to reporting by NBC DFW.
He was booked into the Bexar County Jail and charged with making a terroristic threat against a public servant, a third degree felony, and was held on a $75,000 bond. It was not immediately clear if Caldera has a lawyer or how he plans to plead in response to the charge.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit, DPS was told by a friend of Caldera’s that he “had made verbal threats to assault the Texas State Capitol Building.” He is alleged to have said “I am going to the Capitol and I am going to shoot it up.”
Arrest documents also allege that Caldera’s motive was anger at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel political lobbying group, of which he reportedly said “these people have to be exterminated.”
Of course. Always The Joooooos!
Possibly just a dumbass shooting off his mouth. But lots of similar dumbasses have racked up kill counts in recent decades.
Make New Mexico Texas again? “Texas House Weighs Annexation of New Mexican Counties. The unlikely proposal could benefit the Permian Basin, one state representative claimed.” The chances of New Mexico agreeing without receiving something ridiculous in return (like El Paso) are virtually zero.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced the company’s decision, saying it is a $684 million capital investment that could create 3,800 jobs. The governor also announced that a Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) grant totaling $43,849,500, paired with a Veteran Created Job Bonus of $40,000, was offered to the company.
ASML wants larger EUV masks to support their High Numerical Aperture EUV stepper. “TSMC and ASML recently announced that the Taiwanese fab will adopt High-NA EUV for high volume manufacturer in 2030. In order to make this economical, the two giants will push the industry to adopt larger 6 in x 12in rectangular photo masks.” This is going to be a challenge for the entire industry ecosystem.
Retro-future noir. With aliens. Directed by Brad Bird. Mood: Cautious optimism.
BeardMeatsFood demolishes a 7 Deadly Sins challenge…and then promptly orders two more burgers and dessert. (OK, technically four more burgers, but it looks like he gave two to the cameraman.)
I just sent out my latest Lame Excuse Books catalog of SF/F/H books. Drop me a line if you’d like to receive a copy.
“Feminist Mad That The Men She Hates Won’t Date Her.” “I don’t get it. I’m aggressive, shrill, angry, and I talk online all the time about how much I hate men. Why won’t any of them ask me out?”
I would buy this so hard: “Mattel Confirms Hanukkah Barbie Comes Complete With Space Laser.”
A happy reunion:
A dog was lost for two days.
They found her and when they took her back to her owner, she started crying. https://t.co/J17xaSYMRe
The Supreme Court green-lights verifying American citizenship for voting, fraud, fraud, and more fraud, Trump gets Greenland without having to buy it, Cruz looks at EPIC City terrorism ties, the Clancy holdout juror speaks, some horrifying child abuse cases, and completely different horrifying murder house, and a surprising amount of Norm Macdonald.
The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 said the Trump administration can use an updated immigration database to verify the citizenship of voters.
A majority of justices agreed to stay pending the outcome of an appeal of a June order from a federal judge that barred the use of a revamped database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had found that federal officials were violating the privacy rights of American citizens by disclosing the citizenship status and Social Security numbers, among other data, in the restructured database. She vacated the 2025 update, which connected Social Security information to the system.
A federal appeals court later upheld the decision.
Trump administration officials then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing in a Sept. 8 brief that the order “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by states to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”
Six justices sided with the administration. In a per curiam opinion, they said that claims from the organizations that sued over the updated database “likely lack merit,” including the allegation that federal officials are violating federal laws, because Congress authorized the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive citizenship information and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration, in a 1996 statute called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.
The majority also said that keeping in place the prohibition “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies.”
States regularly use the system. Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden recently said the state in the fall of 2025 ran the names of its 18 million registered voters through the database and identified 2,724 people who may be noncitizens.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
“USDA Targets 170 NYC Retailers in SNAP Fraud Sweep. ‘SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,’ White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said.”
The Trump administration has stopped more than $5.8 billion in SNAP fraud since taking office, and its latest sweep just hit New York City, where hundreds of undercover investigations led to enforcement action against 170 retailers across all five boroughs.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced “Operation SNAP Back” on Friday as part of a broader push against retailer fraud in the nearly $100 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“This is just the latest action in the Trump Administration’s fight against fraud. The message is clear, if you accept any portion of an annual $100 billion taxpayer program, you must follow the rules or face the consequences,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said. “We owe it to every American taxpayer to safeguard their hard-earned dollars, and these latest enforcement actions are just a small part of the Food and Nutrition Administration’s efforts to remove criminals and bad actors from food stamps.”
The cases involve SNAP trafficking, where benefits are exchanged for cash, along with retailers accused of allowing benefits to be used for alcohol and other ineligible non-food items. USDA says penalties can range from temporary suspension to permanent disqualification and monetary fines. Several cases were also referred to the USDA Office of Inspector General for possible criminal investigation and prosecution.
Investigators used undercover purchases at stores suspected of violating SNAP rules. Some retailers were caught exchanging benefits for cash, while others allegedly processed transactions for prohibited products.
“SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,” White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said. “And thanks to Secretary Rollins, such waste and abuse will stop.”
Here’s your reminder that the fraud is still continuing – boldly, even! – after months of nonstop reporting about it.
Katie Daviscourt of the Post Millennial did some looking into Somali-run daycares in the Seattle area, many of which receive tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars monthly, and you’ll never guess what she found.
Most showed no signs of kids.
Many neighbors say they’ve never seen anything that looks like a daycare in the area!
These families get together, watch each other’s kids sometimes, incorporate as a “daycare,” and collect tens of thousands a month.
Here’s the PM:
In total, Daviscourt reported that in just two neighborhoods there were over $5 million in potential abuses of taxpayer funds, and they had gone to over 20 locations reporting to be daycare locations. Under Seattle’s Child Care Assistance Program, daycares can request government funding in order to back their businesses when they are caring for low-to-middle-income families.
Vice President JD Vance and the White House’s anti-fraud task force canceled Affordable Care Act policies covering more than 760,000 people, the administration announced Tuesday, citing suspected improper and fraudulent enrollments.
The task force, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimates the move will save taxpayers $2.2 billion.
Following the cancellation of 315,000 enrollments, the vice president said officials are going to conduct “additional verification” on about 419,000 more enrollees, whom they suspect may be improperly enrolled or ineligible for the program. Similarly, the Trump administration is banning some insurance brokers who are thought to be complicit in the fraudulent enrollment.
“We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled,” Vance said. “We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits.”
Snip.
“This is what the fraud task force is all about,” the vice president said, alongside CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and other senior administration officials at Tuesday’s press conference. “Saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important” are not victim to waste and fraud.
Oz noted that CMS has issued termination notices to hundreds of brokers, including 469 in late August, and has placed a moratorium on new agents and brokers while officials investigate the eligibility of the additional 419,000 enrollees.
“There will be no new brokers for Obamacare in this country for the next six months, and we do not feel at all conflicted about that decision, because most of the fraud, a disproportionate amount of the fraud, is taking place from these individuals,” Oz said.
The ACA — colloquially known as Obamacare — was passed in 2010 under former President Barack Obama.
And its baleful effects on health care and the federal budget live on…
California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden. To sustain the arrangement, the state imposes the nation’s highest tax rates.
In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime.
We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal aliens can enroll in public-welfare programs or receive benefits on their children’s behalf. In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year. The state’s shadow welfare system, it seems, shows no signs of slowing down.
Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.
“If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”
In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.
“If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the officer said of CalWORKs, the state’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”
These benefits add up. In California, illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health insurance, and various tax credits. Their children qualify for others, including CalWORKs and, as in other states, Section 8 rental subsidies. All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two U.S.-born children, and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year.
State leaders are proud of it. In a recent podcast episode, Governor Gavin Newsom bragged about his “controversial” decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encouraged people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program whose promotional materials assure applicants that “no Social Security number” is “no problem.”
Snip.
Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens. To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.
Medicaid is a good example. Federal law prohibits states from using federal dollars to provide wraparound coverage to illegal immigrants. So, California used a state-funding “bucket” within its Medi-Cal program to extend “full-scope” coverage to illegal aliens. The expansions enrolled some 1.7 million people, costing the state an estimated $10 billion annually—more than twice what the state legislative analyst originally projected.
California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.
Another way that California shuffles cash to illegal immigrants is through those aliens’ children. CalWORKs allows illegal-immigrant parents to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born kids. BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare clearinghouse, even tells applicants that the program will accept a “statement” that the applicant “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible” to qualify for the program.
This model—permissive rules and large loopholes—costs the state billions per year. As benefits and eligibility continue to expand, that figure will only increase in the years ahead.
California shows no sign of paring back this largesse. In 2022, Newsom signed a bill into law that extended taxpayer-funded food benefits to illegal low-income residents. Beginning next October, qualified Californians 55 and older will become eligible for that program, regardless of immigration status. California’s Legislative Analyst estimates that it could cost up to an additional $400 million a year.
Is there any doubt that California Democrats love illegal aliens far more than citizens? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
California Democrats pulled up the ladder to prevent the likes of Nick Shirley and local reporters like JJ Smith, Amy Reichert, and many others from finding out where millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars were fraudulently spent.
In my story, Karen Bass Feels Heat From Feds Over Millions in Stolen and Laundered ‘Homeless’ Funds, we learned that Bill Essayli, who’s supposed to be the U.S. attorney in Central California (LA area) but isn’t because John Thune can’t do his job, this week announced the arrests and indictments of four individuals who had stolen millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars. They were supposed to house and help the homeless, but they helped themselves instead.
After the indictments were announced and after the U.S. House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Authority operators to please come to Washington to have a little chat — under oath — the homeless authority announced it no longer wanted to receive federal funding and, in fact, plans to get out of the homeless business entirely.
Bass and the people in Los Angeles who have run this agency into the ground after bilking taxpayers for years are getting out of the homeless business.
The California Post reports, “LAHSA will not seek to retain responsibility for the annual application for federal homelessness funding, the Homeless Management Information System, the annual point-in-time count or the coordinated-entry system.”
The same federal funding that came from your pockets and mine. The same federal funding lost after these alleged California homeless advocates threw piles of cash in front of an industrial fan and pointed it in the general direction of people who deserve to be in prison.
Follow-up: “Satellite imagery shows significant damage to Moscow Oil Refinery after Ukraine’s drone strike yesterday. Multiple strikes are recorded and oil tanks confirmed destroyed. Additionally, a Pantsir booster intercepted a car.”
“Big JDAM Air Strike on Troop Concentration in Bilytske, Donetsk.” Early in the war, Ukraine couldn’t have carried out a JDAM strike, due to fears of Russian aircraft and SAM batteries, indicating serious Ukrainian degradation of those categories of Russian weapons.
More winning: “Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up.”
Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity. This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it’s the most utility shutdown events in the country’s recent history.
Even when Cuba’s grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time. Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff.
“Protocols are now in place to begin the gradual restoration of the system,” said Felix Estrada, an official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of the city remained completely dark.
Many exhausted residents of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.
“Yesterday I’d gone without power for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.
Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.
The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.
The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.
A linked story suggests it’s the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Greg Gutfeld is rightly upset that Austin’s commie twerp of a U.S. rep is more upset at an illegal alien getting shot than the murder of Andrew Wimsatt, an American citizen he theoretically represented.
On Labor Day a man, Andrew Wimsatt, was viciously murdered in an Austin Park – in an attempted beheading. This creep didn’t give two shits about it.
We often hear leftists accuse billionaires of buying government, and most times the accusations are at least partly off-base.
But not always, and sometimes they are literally doing precisely that: putting privately funded leftists into government offices to run a parallel government that nobody ever voted for. It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.
One such program, funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, placed and paid the salaries of “government employees” strategically inserted into Attorney General offices in Blue states, funding regulations and lawsuits aimed at targets that Bloomberg’s NYU-based NGO program identified as vulnerable to its pressure. The goal was, of course, fighting climate change.
BREAKING: Bloomberg-Backed Climate Group Paying Salaries of Democratic State AG Officials Quietly Shuts Down Amid Congressional, Legal Scrutiny.
“A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.”
Think of it as a cousin to “Zuckerbucks,” where a private entity funds a program that places people in government offices as either quasi- or fully government employees, with a mandate to pursue the NGO’s agenda. The same sort of thing happens with grants to news organizations, where an outside group pays for employees or “coverage” of specific issues, and the stories are still technically the product of the news organization, but the content is directed at producing the results desired by the people who cut the checks.
Snip.
Bloomberg, cut a big check to NYU, which in turn established a program to place its people directly into the offices of State Attorneys General, where they proceeded to sue and harass businesses targeted by the organization.
James Comer opened an investigation into the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, and out of the blue, it closed. He sought documents from it, and “poof!” It’s gone.
In my view, Angela Merkel bears a grave responsibility for the collapse of the centre and the growing ability of the political extremes to set the agenda.
The almost one-third of voters who would support Alternative für Deutschland in a national election are not fascists or Nazis. A substantial proportion are disillusioned CDU voters.
What has disappointed these voters? First, what I see as Merkel’s failures on so many fronts: immigration. Security. Energy. A sustainable strategy for business and economic growth. Digitalisation. Infrastructure maintenance. The list is almost endless.
Second, the extraordinary denial of reality that, in my assessment, Merkel allowed to take hold when it came to immigrants’ responsibility for antisemitism, violence against women, terrorism and gang crime.
Coming from Denmark, where we have reliable statistics on all these matters, I find it frankly shocking to listen to the nonsense coming from Germany’s political elite.
But I would also trace back to Merkel the rise of what is often called “Islamo-leftism” – a tendency that has recently gained ground in Sweden and is also growing in Germany. In Sweden, polls have indicated that 85 per cent of Muslim voters support parties to the left of centre, with almost one in five supporting the Left Party, Vänsterpartiet – a party tainted by antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism. I see no compelling reason to assume that the pattern in Germany is fundamentally different.
My argument, then, is that it is not only the rise in support for the AfD that can be traced back to Merkel. The same applies to the growing support for parties on the German left that promote the political and religious views of a significant proportion of the people, Merkel invited to Germany. Not least on the Gaza question.
Both Democrats and the international left has derided President Trump’s focus on Greenland, saying the U.S. controlling it was a fantasy. Now that he’s signed an agreement with Denmark, I doubt they’re laughing now.
The US-Greenland-Denmark agreement has now been published. I haven’t read it, but Arnaud Bertrand has. This is his analysis of the terms, which appear very favorable to the United States, and well calculated to achieve the goal of preventing undue influence over the Arctic by any hostile power.
Snip.
To sum up:
– The US secured a permanent military foothold that even an independent Greenland would inherit whether it likes it or not
– The US now has veto power over any non-NATO military presence in Greenland, and over who can invest in its strategic infrastructure and resources (beyond NATO and the EU)
– Denmark signed away its say over the principle of new US bases, with only the right to discuss the “implementation details”
– Danish authorities no longer set the rules for US military movement across the island
– And all of it is now justified by the defense of “the American continent”
Lindsay Clancy holdout juror Michael P. Desronvil speaks out.
Michael is a Catholic from a Haitian immigrant family and moved to Massachusetts when he was a young child.
The liberal women who so badly want to destroy him for refusing to acquit a child killer do not know how to handle that. Their woke brains simply cannot compute how to proceed.
Several jurors who wanted to let Clancy off the hook have claimed that Michael did not follow the jury instructions, but they have incriminated themselves with statements indicating they had an ideological agenda in the courtroom. Michael says he “kept getting cut off” by these other jurors, who apparently knew his own thoughts better than him.
This lines up with a statement from a fourth juror who says she was ultimately badgered into changing her vote.”
A female 4th juror comes forward and says the other jurors were pushing to acquit on *DAY 1*
In fact, a whole lot of basic jury procedures seem to have been discarded in the Clancy trial. “Lindsay Clancy jurors broke cardinal rule and used phones to RESEARCH killer mom during deliberations, holdout claims.”
“Feds arrest, indict hundreds in Trump voter fraud crackdown: ‘Catching it all over the country.’ The Justice Department says its crackdown on noncitizen voting and election fraud has already produced more than 200 arrests and indictments, with that number possibly doubling soon and state election officials themselves now facing potential charges for looking the other way.”
Since the Trump Justice Department warned state and local election officials that they could be charged with allowing fraudulent voting activities, more than 200 arrests and indictments have been secured in a crackdown on election fraud and noncitizen voting, and that number could double soon, a top official revealed to Just the News.
“I think there are a lot of nervous election officials because I think some of them know that they’ve been looking the other way when this is happening, and we’re catching it all over the country,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said Monday night in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.
Dhillon also hinted at further developments in the coming weeks, suggesting her department has developed evidence calling into question New Jersey’s claim that a computer glitch allowed thousands of foreigners to register to vote in that state and about 400 to actually cast ballots in violation of law.
“I’m not sure we have the correct numbers from New Jersey. They’re not really cooperating with us, and so we will get to the bottom of what happened there. And you know, New Jersey tried to blame a vendor for a mistake or a glitch, quote unquote. But you know, I think there’ll be another side to that story,” she said.
Snip.
Over the weekend, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that his agency is investigating 1,620 cases of voter fraud involving noncitizens and has made 151 arrests. He said his department is also looking into an additional 300,000 cases based on states’ voter rolls.
That thing that never happens keeps happening. “DOJ Charges 16 Noncitizens in Voter Fraud Cases.”
Howard Dean speaks to the ChiComs: “DNC Chairman Emeritus Howard Dean delivered the American welcome address at a China dialogue involving the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank identified in congressional commission testimony as ‘run by Chinese intelligence.’ The Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, which co-organized the event, has an equally explicit allegiance. Its charter says it: ‘upholds the comprehensive leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Ties between the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the proposed EPIC City development in North Texas came under scrutiny during a recent U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing chaired by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
EPIC City, which has been criticized as an Islamic enclave and housing development exclusive to Muslims, is a proposal from the East Plano Islamic Center.
The Wednesday hearing of the subcommittee on federal courts, oversight, agency action, and federal rights was titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.”
Sen. Cruz addressed the fact that Democrat senators failed to attend the meeting, stating that “their campaign is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America.”
Cruz heard from witnesses that alleged ties between CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and EPIC City.
Arielle F. Klepach, senior litigation counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center, called attention to the connection in her written testimony.
She likened the EPIC City development, later rebranded as “The Meadow” following significant backlash, to a pattern of “mega-mosque” building projects in Europe commonly motivated by “Islamist separatism.”
This movement is a “deliberate attempt to cut Muslim communities off spiritually, intellectually, and culturally from the surrounding secular society,” with the building projects in particular “generally [containing] community-like features such as schools, libraries, and gyms,” according to Klepach.
“The American version of this pattern is EPIC City,” Klepach said. “CAIR-Texas and CAIR-DFW have publicly defended EPIC City in the disputes, and CAIR’s national leadership has spoken at the EPIC mosque, reflecting an active advocacy relationship between CAIR and the EPIC religious community.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was designated a foreign terrorist organization by Gov. Greg Abbott late last year, along with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The hearing also revisited CAIR’s role as an unindicted co-conspirator to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). The foundation and five of its officials were convicted of “funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas” during a 2008 federal trial. CAIR was not charged in the case.
Lara Burns, senior research fellow for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, drew the connection between CAIR and Hamas in her written testimony.
“The United States Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee served as the original Hamas infrastructure in the United States, initially consisting of the HLF (the fundraising arm),” alongside others, according to Burns.
“At the [2008] trial, still today the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in American history, [various arms of the Muslim Brotherhood] were identified as unindicted co-conspirators/joint ventures as was [CAIR],” she added.
A father-and-son serial killer house of horror found in Pennsylvania.
A Pennsylvania father and son have come under suspicion after the son was discovered to be traveling with a woman with a fake ID that used the name of a missing woman.
Police searched the home of the man and his dad and found the most disturbing scene imaginable.
he investigation is still unfolding but this is some seriously unsettling stuff going on.
Here’s the latest from ABC 6 in Philly on the now 7 missing women connected to this case against Eugene Horsch and his deceased father RC:
Blair Tonzelli was 35 years old when she went missing in 2023. She was the first woman named in this case.
Police say when Horsch was arrested, he was with a woman in possession of an identification card with Tonzelli’s name on it. The woman allegedly told police Eugene Horsch gave her the ID.
Amy McHale was 44 years old when she was last seen in 2016. Shortly after news broke of Horsch’s arrest, her family told Action she was last seen at the W. Chew Avenue house.
McHale had previously been married to Ray Horsch, who has also become a central figure in this case.
Gabrielle Amarando was 22 years old when she disappeared in 2012.
A childhood friend of Amarando told Action News that loved ones grew increasingly concerned when they stopped hearing from her…
Roughly 14 years later, her family got the confirmation they were looking for.
In August, police said the women were seen in photos and videos recovered during the investigation, in which both are seen alive and then later appearing to be dead.
‘Based on the video and photo evidence — if the images in the video are real and not altered in any way, based on their review — the M.E. would believe the individuals depicted in the images are deceased,’ Philadelphia Police Inspector Ray Evers.
Maribel Fresses was the other woman seen in the videos and photos. She [was] 27 when she disappeared in 2018.
Police also saw photos and videos of two other unidentified women, both alive and then dead, as well as video of the elder Horsch strangling a woman to death.
Five urns believed to have the unidentified remains of five women were found in the home.
Millions of photos and videos have so far revealed that at least 7 women who went missing ultimately met their demise at the hands of the Horsches.
Shades of H. H. Holmes…
UK functionaries go out of their way to protect their precious illegal aliens. “British government mobilizes HUNDREDS of police and defense units to protect migrant boat from British protesters.”
Third World migrants are being led across the channel by French authorities, where British police then escort them into harbor, put them aboard taxpayer-funded coach buses, and give them a police escort with hundreds of officers.
Snip.
Earlier in the day, British protesters gathered by land and by sea to peacefully demonstrate against a group of 60 or so migrants that was set to land in southern England in Gosport.
Because of the protesters gathered along the coast, authorities had to scramble to find a new landing spot for the “newcomers.” The buses were seen with a massive police escort.
The reason for the escort was due to the fear that the British protesters would get “mostly peaceful” and attack the invaders or the masked bus drivers who are helping traffic them into the country:
One GB News reporter summed up the massive taxpayer expenditure that was spent to assist the migrants:
The whole thing from start to finish today, for this one boat of 60-odd or however many it turns out to be, to go all the way flanked by a massive French ship, then to our [Royal National Lifeboat Institution] boats, then all of those resources pumped into Gosport.
And THEN, it looks as though because of the local reaction, they’ve decided to not to that, take them down either to Eastport or Dover or somewhere else anyway.
So goodness knows what the resources are going to be like there.
We are talking MILLIONS of Pounds today alone, for a group of 60 illegal migrants.
Is there any doubt the Labour government prioritizes importing illegal aliens into the country over taking care of their own citizens?
Forget about Somali daycare fraud for a moment – have you heard about toddler fight club? A daycare in Fort Worth, TX is facing investigations and litigation after evidence showed staff abusing young children and forcing them to fight each other.
One mother, Heather Harris, knew something was wrong when she picked up her 4-year-old son at the Arka Montessori Academy of Risinger daycare. He was crying uncontrollably and was covered in bruises. Employees told the mother her son had fought with another child, but their explanations did not add up, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Harris and her husband, Richard Harris. She insisted on seeing the classroom’s surveillance footage.
The disturbing footage shows staff at the daycare swing a child around like a rag-doll and trying to force him to fight another child.
I’m skipping right past the obvious “First Rule of Toddler Fight Club” joke to point out that if my (theoretical) kid were forced into that, both daycare and the employees would be facing both a huge civil lawsuit and criminal charges.
More horrifying child abuse: “Transgender ICU nurse arrested on multiple counts of abusing NICU baby at Michigan hospital.”
[Kieran Ansley], a now-former nurse at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has been charged with child abuse after a 4-month-old girl in his [sic] care was found with multiple broken bones and bruising.
The injuries were noticed by the infant’s mother during an early morning visit in April, records show. Tests and a full skeletal survey found multiple fractures, including broken leg bones and multiple bruises, court records show. Bruising was found on the infant’s hands, arms, thigh, buttocks, abdomen and tongue, court records show.
‘The totality of the findings resulted in a diagnosis of pediatric physical abuse,’ court documents show.
More horrifying details snipped. Hell’s too good for him.
Dallas’ “Y’all Street” continues to capitalize on momentum as the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) enters a new era of growth.
North Texas has added a stock exchange alongside its iconic stockyards, and companies are beginning to flock to the TXSE’s transfer portal. TXSE opened in July, and September has seen the first corporate commitments and primary listing transfers.
On September 16, Texas Capital’s Texas Equity Index exchange-traded fund (ETF) and Texas Oil Index ETF became the TXSE’s first primary listings. The company’s CEO, President, and Chairman, Rob Holmes, rang the bell on “Y’all Street” to celebrate the company’s primary listing transfer. Texas Capital was formerly listed on the Nasdaq.
Holmes stated in a Bloomberg interview about the transfer, “Once this exchange came to fruition, it was our responsibility to look at the three exchanges and pick the best one for Texas Capital.”
He praised the TXSE’s investor base as an affirmation of the exchange’s technological and strategic innovation. The TXSE saw over $275 million in total investment, with major investors including BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Charles Schwab.
Competing securities exchanges include the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, both based in New York City.
Holmes asserted that TXSE’s net present value (NPV) is “better” than its New York rivals.
“On this exchange, instead of just paying a fee, we pay a fee, but at the end of the day we have a net cash position from the exchange,” he said.
If someone can explain what that last sentence means, please do so in the comments…
“Democrat candidate caught crying in the back of cop car after DUI arrest. Washington state Democratic House candidate Krista Perez was seen crying, praying and sobbing in the back of a patrol car after her DUI arrest.” Washington state has a jungle primary, with two Democratic candidates for House of Representatives District 29-Position 1 (the state has 49 districts of two reps each) facing each other in November, so Republicans won’t be able to take advantage here.
Jay Leno’s Law, exempting classic cars from California’s draconian emissions regulations, was signed into law in a rare act of sanity from Governor Hairgel. But note it doesn’t take effect until January 1, 2028.
The 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, GOP midterm convention, Iran and Yemen both get spicy again, AfD shocks Germany, Ukraine’s longest drone strike yet, more welfare state fraud, more money for Paxton,
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
More information about the murder of my friend Andrew Wimsatt has come out, and some of my original post needs to be corrected. I’m going to put that in a Saturday post, and there will be another for remembering Andrew on Sunday.
On a perfectly clear morning 25 years ago, America changed forever.
At 8:46 a.m. on that day, a team of Islamic terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 76 passengers and eleven crew members, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was followed 17 minutes later by United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 51 passengers and nine crew members, which terrorists steered into the South Tower. Less than 90 minutes later, both of those towers had collapsed into a massive pile of rubble.
Meanwhile, as Americans’ televisions were tuned to live footage of the burning buildings, American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 53 passengers and six crew members, was slammed into the Pentagon. And shortly after, United Airlines Flight 93, with 33 passengers and seven crew members, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.
Today, we remember the 2,977 innocent victims who were the first casualties in what would become known as the War on Terror. We also remember the extraordinary heroism displayed that day, without which the horrific losses would have been far worse.
One of the most miraculous facts about that day was that at the World Trade Center, which may have had an occupancy of 19,000 people between the two buildings at the time, 99 percent of those who were below the point of impact of the planes survived. This achievement is owed to the extraordinary evacuation efforts of first responders, who ran into burning buildings, no doubt knowing that there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it out. In the end, 441 firefighters, police officers, and paramedics did not.
Then there was the civilian heroism displayed by the passengers on Flight 93, who had heard about what happened at the World Trade Center, overtook the plane, and ensured that it crashed in an empty field rather than into the U.S. Capitol or White House, one of which was believed to be the potential target. Passenger Todd Beamer’s remark to his fellow passengers, “Let’s roll,” overheard from a phone call, became a rallying cry as the nation fought back.
I have no dramatic, notable 9/11 stories to tell. I was driving to my job at Applied Materials when NPR (yes, I sometimes listened to them in the morning, back in the day) broke into regular coverage to report the first tower impact. I heard a rumor that the layoff that came next week (as the depths of the Dotcom Bust were just being felt) was actually scheduled for that day, but they decided to hold off due to the attacks. Ironically, one of the people in one of the planes was an Israeli Applied employee, who survived a country beset by terrorism only to be killed on an American flight.
President Donald Trump delivered the convention’s closing remarks following a keynote address from Vice President J.D. Vance.Before they took the stage, though, Texas Republicans used their appearances to focus on the November elections, public safety, immigration, and the direction of the Democrat Party.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick invoked Texas history and the Alamo before turning to the November election, portraying the contest as a broader fight over the country’s values.
“This election coming up is not about politics,” said Patrick. “It’s about darkness, and it’s about light.”
He accused Democrats of embracing socialism and communism and argued that Texas’ economic growth has been driven by conservative policies including low taxes and no state income tax.
He also singled out Democrat Senate nominee James Talarico, saying Republicans would put “the Democratic Party and James Talarico and his ilk on the dust heap of history.”
Patrick closed his remarks by urging Republicans to view the election as a fight for their families and the country. “You started a fight, and the Republicans are going to finish it in November.”
Eric Flores and Tano Tijerina, two Republican candidates challenging Democrats in South Texas, also addressed the convention. Their appearances highlighted Republicans’ continued focus on South Texas, where the president made significant gains in 2024.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz used his speech to warn about what he described as an emerging red-green alliance between communists and Islamists. He received one of the strongest reactions from the crowd when he declared that Sharia law is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.
“Sharia law has no place in America,” said Cruz. “Sharia law is fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution, and we need to stand together and stop it now.”
Gov. Greg Abbott focused much of his speech on Texas Democrats running statewide in November, contrasting their legislative records with policies he has signed into law.
Abbott pointed to the GOP’s success on a variety of issues including border security, policing, property taxes, oil and gas, election laws, parental rights, and school choice.
“All the Democrats running statewide in the state of Texas, they had a chance to vote on those policies, and they voted against those policies,” said Abbott. “They voted against common sense.”
Abbott highlighted legislation he signed prohibiting cities that reduce police funding from receiving certain state tax revenue, restricting some purchases of Texas property by citizens and entities tied to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and prohibiting gender mutilation procedures for minors.
Snip.
Vice President J.D. Vance delivered the night’s keynote address, reflecting on the administration’s first 19 months back in office and making the case for Republicans in November.
Vance also paid tribute to Charlie Kirk on the anniversary of his assassination, recalling that Kirk had been in the front row when Vance addressed the Republican National Convention as the party’s vice presidential nominee in 2024.
Turning to Texas politics, Vance took aim at Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico over his previous comments on gender and Christianity.
“This Talarico guy—he will not shut up about how there are six genders. He will not shut up about how, ‘God is non-binary,’” said Vance.
“I gotta say, a guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children-I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser.”
Last night Germany’s much-maligned AfD party won a crushing and historic victory. The victory is already being downplayed by many, owing to the fact that Saxony-Anhalt is technically one of Germany’s smallest and least consequential states. But there is far more to it than sheer numbers, as the win defines a turning point not only in German but European politics, and cements the gradual downfall of the globalist ruling class that has tried desperately for decades to keep populist movements from gaining power, in particular utilizing the “Brandmauer” or “firewall” to suppress the so-called far-right.
The destruction of this firewall is an historic occasion, even if it should come by way of such a seemingly inconsequential state.
Of course, there are other criticisms as well. AfD is seen by many as a kind of Trojan horse, a German “MAGA” party led by a lesbian woman in Alice Weidel. Even so, it represents a striking loss of power for the elites and a turning point which breaks a kind of psychological barrier that will only energize other anti-establishment, “far-right”, or populist parties throughout Europe.
Another secondary effect of the victory is that it has caused the ruling German establishment to go back to the drawing board and review its most unpopular policies, like on immigration, in order to bend with the clearly changing winds.
Merz expressed his “deep shock” at the election result, foreseeing it having major repercussions on Germany as a whole:
The AfD, however, fell just three seats short of an ‘absolute majority’ which would have allowed it to govern the state alone. Some commentators have pointed out some major ‘anomalies’ in regard to mail-in versus in-person votes. Just like in the highly irregular American 2020 election, every party but AfD was allegedly boosted by disproportionate numbers of mail-in votes:
More analysis at the link. Just think if Germany’s elites hadn’t decided to import millions of unassimilated Muslims into their country, they wouldn’t have empowered the AfD. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Yemen has also been getting spicy, with the Iranian-backed Houthis driving for the coast, successfully attacking a Saudi pipeline, and the official anti-Houthi government of Yemen making gains in the interior. More from Preston Stewart. If this week hadn’t been so insane, I might have done a separate post on this…
Maybe this is why I’m still unemployed. “Women Filled 98 Percent of Jobs Created in August.”
Women accounted for 158,000, or 98 percent, of the 162,000 nonfarm payroll jobs created in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ establishment data. Compared to this time last year, there are 870,000 more women employed in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 1.5 million fewer employed men.
So there were only 4,000 men hired in August.
Accounting for the new data, the gap between male and female employment reached its highest level since 1990, when men were overrepresented in the workforce.
Dramatic month-to-month swings in employment gains between the sexes are relatively common, and labor economists warn that sharp shifts don’t necessarily indicate lasting changes in the market. However, the August jobs report is in keeping with existing trends that have obtained for decades, namely a substantial increase in employment among women and a linear decline in employment among men.
There has been a “multi-decade decline in male labor force participation” and a “multi-decade increase in female labor force participation,” Kirk Doran, a professor specializing in labor economics at Notre Dame University, told National Review.
Part of this shift can be explained by the evolution of American industries. The sectors that grew at the highest rate in August — health care and public education — are female-dominated. Meanwhile, the industries that shrank — computing, data processing, and finance — are male-heavy.
We have every reason to be excited to go to the polls to ensure an ongoing Congressional Republican majority, and to keep the DSA-influenced Democrats away from any levers of power.
The 20 months since President Trump’s inauguration in early 2025 have had the most significant conservative victories of my lifetime, far exceeding President Reagan’s accomplishments. Here are just a few of the things President Trump and his team have done:
Closed the border to illegal invaders.
Deported hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, and caused millions more to self-deport.
Slashed the federal workforce.
Eliminated DEI and wokeness from the military and federal agencies.
Eliminated EV mandates and green energy subsidies.
Effectively terminated corporate average fuel economy requirements for auto manufacturers.
Engaged the military to eliminate narco-terrorists.
Engaged the DOJ to target corporations engaged in illegal racial discrimination in hiring.
There are so many more milestone accomplishments beyond those.
For decades the conservative base has clamored for the above victories. President Trump finally delivered. Amidst all this, there are many “conservative” influencers who are promoting doom. For many of them, that is their job – being paid to blackpill conservative voters to stay home, so as to elect a Democrat Congress. The resumption of Democrat lawfare against the Trump administration is their goal.
Despite razor-thin congressional majorities, Trump47 has delivered numerous policy wins, and conservatives (and anyone else who wants to stop the insane, jihad-friendly, socialism- and social justice-infected Democrats from reclaiming power) should head to the polls in November to ensure Republican control through 2028.
“Ukraine’s Longest Range Drone Strike Yet! Nearly 3,000km! Plus Strikes on Sochi and Dagestan.” “Ukrainian drones carried out their longest range drone strike to date, hitting Russia’s Novy Urengoy and Purovsky gas processing plants in Yamalo-Nenets.” Yamalo-Nenets is an “autonomous okrug” on the Arctic Circle just east of the Urals.
Quality Care Access, LLC was chartered in July 2020 by Jovin Bayingana, and the Portland-based company rapidly became one of the most lucrative new MaineCare businesses in New England.
According to Medicaid payment records obtained via a Freedom of Access Act request, the company billed the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for $1.2 million in 2021, $5.3 million in 2022, $7.4 million in 2023, $6.7 million in 2024, and $7.2 million in 2025 — for a lifetime cost of $27.8 million.
The more detailed federal Medicaid dataset shows that throughout this time frame QCA had fewer than 16 patients in most years.
Finally: “Republican Reinforcements Arrive for Paxton in Senate Race. The Senate Leadership Fund is pouring millions into Texas after questions over whether the Cornyn-aligned group would back Paxton.”
Republican reinforcements are finally arriving for Attorney General Ken Paxton in his U.S. Senate race, months after the party’s biggest Senate-focused outside group backed his primary opponent.
The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has purchased $32 million in television advertisements across Texas and is reportedly preparing to spend more than $50 million to support Paxton against Democrat James Talarico.
The group announced Friday it created a new Texas PAC dedicated to the race, with ads promoting Paxton and contrasting his record with Talarico expected to run continuously through Election Day.
The investment ends months of uncertainty over whether the Senate Leadership Fund would support Paxton after backing Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary.
It also comes as other major Republican groups have already begun pouring money into the race.
MAGA Inc., the super PAC aligned with President Donald Trump, recently announced $10 million in advertising supporting Paxton. America PAC, the political group backed by Elon Musk, is also supporting Paxton and has begun door-knocking operations to register and get out the vote.
This is good, if overdue news, but media ad spends are the fools gold of politics. The same group spending zillions for Cornyn didn’t move the needle, so the efficacy of their political efforts seems debatable. But maybe they’re better at convincing squishy moderates than Republican primary voters…
Democrat Texas House candidate Oziel Ochoa’s campaign sponsored a May Day event co-hosted by the Rio Grande Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Ochoa is challenging Republican State Rep. Janie Lopez for House District 37, a South Texas district covering Willacy County and portions of Cameron County.
Campaign finance records show Ochoa’s campaign made three $259 payments to La Union del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE, on May 4. The expenditures, totaling $777, were listed as advertising expenses for the first annual May Day Marcha del Pueblo (March of the People).
May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, is an annual labor observance that has long been embraced by socialist and communist movements around the world.
The event took place two days earlier, on May 2, in Edinburg.
Organizers included LUPE, Texas Rising, the Rio Grande Valley American Federation of Teachers, the Rio Grande Valley Central Labor Council, South Texans for Reproductive Justice, Poder Latinx, and the Rio Grande Valley Democratic Socialists of America.
Ochoa was publicly recognized for his financial support, while RGV DSA was listed among the event’s organizers.
The former police chief of Hamtramck, Michigan, is in hot water after investigators have dug into allegations against the Muslim chief for how he ran his department.
Court records show that Hamtramck Police Chief Jamiel Altaheri personally engaged in a “pattern” of domestic violence in his own household, and told officers that wife-beating isn’t a “formal” crime.
The primary effects of Democrats importing unassimilated Muslims for political advantage seems to be more wife-beating and more rape.
“Criminal Illegal Alien Arrested in Texas, Ordered Deported 26 Years Ago. A Cuban national who evaded deportation for 26 years is now behind bars.” “According to ICE, Cuban national Emiliano Martinez Perez entered the United States around 1998 and was convicted of cocaine possession shortly afterward. He was ordered to leave the U.S. in early 2000, but remained in the country and was later convicted of drug trafficking in 2007.”
Speaking of immigration fraud: “Houston Immigration Attorney Arrested for Fraud. Nowowiejski allegedly committed mail fraud and made false statements related to immigration cases.”
A Houston immigration attorney was arrested Wednesday after a federal grand jury indicted her on charges of mail fraud and making false statements related to her work on behalf of immigrants seeking work-related legal status in the United States.
Alla Nowowiejski is a naturalized citizen from Russia and has practiced law in Texas since 2009 and specialized in business immigration assistance, but she allegedly never submitted, or only partially submitted, paperwork for clients seeking to obtain work status or work visas.
The indictment also alleges that Nowowiejski provided clients with false documents or reference numbers tied to active immigration cases unrelated to her own clients to make them believe their applications were being processed.
In 2023, Audubon Engineering Operations sued Nowowiejski for gross negligence and legal malpractice in Harris County. The company alleged that although she had charged them more than $109,000 for immigration work on behalf of five employees, she never filed paperwork with federal immigration agencies.
“Chaos ensues in Democratic Party after Arab reporter calls black congressman ‘AIPAC monkey.'” Arab reporter is Rula Jebreal (who, I guess, is most famous for dating Roger Waters) and the black congressman is Hakeem Jeffries. Hakeem Jeffries should never be called a monkey, only “TEMU Obama.”
The deal would mark the first chunk of change the nation will provide to the U.S. under South Korea’s new $350 billion commitment.
Last year, tariff talks between the U.S. and South Korea led to a 10 percent decrease in tariffs imposed on South Korea — a drop from 25 to 15 percent — provided the country invests $350 billion in the U.S. in exchange.
The power project would be set in Encinal, Texas, a small city in La Salle County.
According to The Korea Herald, talks initially began with South Korea proposing $19.8 billion for the project, and the U.S. countering with $25 billion. Negotiations will now proceed in the $22.6 billion range, although the exact amount will not be determined until the project is finalized.
The proposed gas combined-cycle project plant would total 6.3 gigawatts (GW) of power, built in stages. The first stage will consist of a 1.4-GW gas turbine power facility. Once the first stage passes inspection, the second stage, a 4.9-GW combined-cycle facility, will be built.
Though unconfirmed, the plant is expected to help meet the state’s booming demands for artificial intelligence (AI) computing capacity, data center development, and semiconductor development.
Microsoft Corp. today issued updates to plug at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever. Microsoft says artificial intelligence is helping to speed the discovery of vulnerabilities, but security experts warn that many organizations already are struggling to prioritize the more human-intensive endeavor of testing and deploying so many fixes each month.
This month’s patch bundle obliterates the software giant’s previous record set in July, when it released updates for at least 570 security vulnerabilities. September’s Patch Tuesday brings this year’s total to more than 2,600, more than twice Microsoft’s previous record-setting patch year in 2020 (1,245) and with three more months to go.
There are two “zero-day” flaws fixed this month that are being actively exploited: both CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on Windows system.
Fully 113 of the bugs addressed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or miscreants to seize control over a vulnerable Windows machine with little or no help from the user.
Among the more serious critical flaws this month is CVE-2026-69730, a DNS weakness present in Windows Server 2012 onward and on Windows 10. Microsoft warns that an unauthenticated attacker could leverage this weakness simply by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected system, and that it is likely to be exploited.
Also scary is CVE-2026-69829, a critical, remote code execution flaw in the Windows Shell. This vulnerability has a CVSS base score of 9.8 (10 is the most severe), and can be exploited with low attack complexity, no privileges, and no user interaction.
Whatever else AI is or isn’t good at, it seems to be great at finding security flaws in Microsoft products…
It’s incredibly important to own physical media, because you do not know what people are going to do that work for these massive tech companies. Once they get a hold of the data and they put it into those AI [slop] machines, because that’s what they are, they can change anything. Half the stuff that people, when they Google things or whatever, that just comes out with some AI thing that’s based on something that somebody wrote on Reddit six years ago that’s probably not even true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Who actually knows whether it’s true? It’s kind of like if you listen to a record on Spotify that says remastered in 2018, remastered in 2022, remastered in 2012, that’s not the original version. What they’ve done is they’ve either taken the original version, the mastered version, and just remastered it and made it sound worse, or you don’t know what they’ve actually done to it.
Another weird blog tidbit that may only be of interest to myself: Starting October 6, 2025 and running through February 9th, 2026, the Internet Archive took multiple daily snapshots of my blog after a long period of snapshotting it on a somewhat random basis, sometimes several time a week, and sometimes only a few times a month. I would say the optimal periodicity would be once a day, but I have no idea how the process works.
This is Charlotte. While everyone’s losing their minds over delayed flights and tiny seats, this Jack Russell snagged a blue balloon at the airport and turned the terminal into her own racetrack. Pure zoomie chaos in the best way on Red Bull levels. https://t.co/v8WbxBxT33
— Puppies & Positivity (@Puppieslover) March 4, 2026
New York Times seems very upset we might win in Iran, the economy adds more jobs (or, as I call it in my house, Passover), ActBlue employees keep invoking the Fifth, the left still wants to trans your kids, a mistrial for Murder Mom, and the unwritten rules of the Internet.
Conditions in the Strait of Hormuz are coming unstuck in ways that advance American interests, although the situation remains stalemated.
CNN reported late last week that “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway” as the U.S. Navy quietly but effectively transits oil-laden tankers out of the strait under Iranian noses. In concert with the oil and petroleum products escaping the region via overland pipelines, Donald Trump’s energy secretary indicated that energy exports from the region are now approaching pre-war levels.
CNN couldn’t independently verify the administration’s figures. Nor could the Wall Street Journal. But to a certain extent, that is to be expected from a covert operation like the one the U.S. is engaged in. “Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery,” the Journal reported Monday. The report’s headline warns that industry trackers “can’t find” the exports the White House touts, but the body of the article notes that some of those trackers’ estimates about what could be coming online run “closer to the administration’s numbers,” albeit only recently.
Even if it only backed into the policy of economic strangulation that it’s applying to the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is finally seeing it produce some positive results. Naturally, then, it’s incumbent on the president to surrender to the Iranians while he still can. At least, that’s the argument Rosemary Kelanic brought to the pages of the New York Times.
Kelanic, the director of Defense Priorities’ Middle East program and a contributor to the Quincy Institute’s “Responsible Statecraft” blog, contends at the outset of her Monday op-ed that “defeat” is now America’s “least bad option.” The U.S. has little choice but to quit the field, allowing Iran to control and toll an international waterway. But it’s not clear why America must give up now.
As Kelanic admits, the war has shown that, even if the U.S. “cannot completely open” the strait, Iran “cannot completely close” it either. Why should they be bequeathed an unprecedented level of sovereignty over an international maritime chokepoint that they could not capture on their own? Kelanic doesn’t say. She does, however, dwell on America’s challenges.
The geography of the strait ensures that it is “impossible to decisively defeat” Iranian harassment initiatives. Modern technology, like cheap missiles and drones, creates “endemic risk of crossing Hormuz that even a negotiated deal with Tehran would not eliminate.” That sounds like a rationale for abandoning the negotiations that will, by Kelanic’s own admission, fail to produce a durable (much less desirable) outcome.
Indeed, the author doesn’t even attempt to strike a more-in-sorrow tone when arguing for America’s capitulation. The United States is struggling with an irreparable shortage of munitions, she suggests. And even if America’s ordnance stocks were brimming, its people have no stomach for a long-duration mission to “sneak oil through Hormuz.” In fact, the voting public may even resent the political class’s resistance to an Iranian tolling regime that extracts funds primarily from foreign pockets. After all, “those countries could pay their own way.”
The U.S., Kelanic adds, has little slack in its economy — quite unlike the less “oil-intensive” economies of China and Russia. That’s a kick that Kelanic has been on for some time. And she has a point when it comes to China, albeit one that was overstated at the outset of Operation Epic Fury; China’s energy position today is sustained by its consumption restrictions, its oil reserves, and its “shift toward coal.” By contrast, the argument that Russia can easily absorb a fuel shock is betrayed by the evidence of your own eyes.
At no point does Kelanic acknowledge the buffers in the American economy. The “shale revolution,” the Journal’s Greg Ip observed, “has turned the U.S. into a net exporter of petroleum and major exporter of liquefied natural gas.” That might account for some of “the recent resilience of world oil markets,” which Kelanic admits “surprised many.”onditions in the Strait of Hormuz are coming unstuck in ways that advance American interests, although the situation remains stalemated.
CNN reported late last week that “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway” as the U.S. Navy quietly but effectively transits oil-laden tankers out of the strait under Iranian noses. In concert with the oil and petroleum products escaping the region via overland pipelines, Donald Trump’s energy secretary indicated that energy exports from the region are now approaching pre-war levels.
CNN couldn’t independently verify the administration’s figures. Nor could the Wall Street Journal. But to a certain extent, that is to be expected from a covert operation like the one the U.S. is engaged in. “Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery,” the Journal reported Monday. The report’s headline warns that industry trackers “can’t find” the exports the White House touts, but the body of the article notes that some of those trackers’ estimates about what could be coming online run “closer to the administration’s numbers,” albeit only recently.
Even if it only backed into the policy of economic strangulation that it’s applying to the Islamic Republic, the Trump administration is finally seeing it produce some positive results. Naturally, then, it’s incumbent on the president to surrender to the Iranians while he still can. At least, that’s the argument Rosemary Kelanic brought to the pages of the New York Times.
We can’t let American win in Iran because that might help Trump.
Good news! “Economy Adds 162,000 Jobs in August 2026.”
The August 2026 jobs report blew all expectations out of the water.
Economists expected the economy to add only 53,000 jobs.
Well…the report shows the economy added 162,000 jobs:
Food services and drinking places: +59,000
Local government education: +42,000
Manufacturing: +16,000
Health care: +13,000
Information: -23,000
Construction: +22,000
The bad news for me personally: My sector (information) was the only one of those with job losses. AI continues to suck up all the VC funding…
More countries are reconsidering their support agreements with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a senior State Department official confirmed to Just the News.
Following Just the News reporting that the United States’ Agency for International Development’s Inspector General’s office found more than 100 UNRWA employees had participated in the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, Finland’s minister for foreign trade and development announced on Thursday that the country would not extend its support for UNRWA.
Several more countries have since indicated that they are reconsidering their own support for UNRWA as well, a senior State Department official briefed on the USAID IG’s investigation told Just the News.
It’s a bribe and terrorism organization with a debating society attached.
Hmmmm. “Another ActBlue Official Pleads Fifth In House Probe of Alleged Foreign Donations.” Why, it’s almost like they’re guilty.
Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a member of ActBlue’s board of directors, invoked her constitutional right against self-incrimination while appearing before the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees, according to sources familiar with her testimony.
ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis invoked the Fifth during a closed-door deposition Aug. 20, while CEO Regina Wallace-Jones asserted the same right during congressional questioning in June.
The House Administration Committee began investigating ActBlue in 2023 following concerns that the fundraising platform’s fraud-prevention procedures were inadequate to prevent illegal foreign donations.
German police have opened a terror investigation after two attacks on power stations, and a bombing at a railway station, within 24 hours.
Officials are investigating the possibility that the power plant attacks were carried out by a hostile foreign state, such as Russia, or home-grown Left-wing terrorists.
California has bicoastal company in its efforts to drastically reinterpret a Supreme Court precedent that reinstated a permanent injunction against the Golden State’s so-called gender secrecy policies in public schools, with the majority citing a century of parental rights precedents that it said lower courts were ignoring.
Moms for Liberty is suing a New York City suburb on behalf of unnamed members with children there, seeking to force New Jersey’s Chathams School District to notify and give parents veto power over their children’s “asserted ‘gender transition'” and “social transition-related accommodations,” arguing a trio of related policies violate the Mirabelli precedent.
School Board President Ann Ciccarelli argued at a June 15 public meeting that the high court’s March 2 emergency order was “not binding” on New Jersey public schools, in response to demands from parents to eliminate a policy requiring schools to “accept a student’s asserted gender identity regardless of parent consent or involvement.”
SCOTUS scolded the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Mirabelli for having “brushed aside” its 2025 precedent Mahmoud, which required school districts to notify and get consent from parents before exposing their children to LGBTQ “storybooks,” by wrongly limiting it to curricular decisions.
“The Chathams Board of Education’s open defiance of the Supreme Court’s clear rulings in Mirabelli and Mahmoud is an assault on the constitutional rights of every family in that district,” Moms for Liberty CEO Tina Descovich said.
In a Federal Election Commission filing made on Wednesday night, America PAC disclosed $800,475 in total spending in August.
The expenditure data showed that the billionaire’s PAC primarily poured resources into competitive Senate races in Texas, Maine, Ohio, New Hampshire, Michigan and a few other states.
The Texas Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton received the largest share of spending—around $248,000.
The Maine Senate race, which Democrats view as a key pickup opportunity, received the next largest tranche of spending at around $170,000.
In total, the PAC spent around $712,000 on seven Senate races—around 90% of the total disclosed expenses—and only around $88,000 on a small number of House races.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“80% of drug traffickers arrested in Portland in the last 3 years have been illegal aliens.
The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon announced on Tuesday that more than 80 percent of the roughly 100 defendants federally charged with trafficking fentanyl in Portland are illegal aliens from Honduras and Mexico. The apprehensions began in 2023 and remain ongoing as federal and local authorities work to rid the sanctuary city of drug-related criminal activity.
As a result of the crackdown on open-air drug markets, authorities have seized more than 100 kilograms of fentanyl, 40 guns, and $1.3 million in proceeds. ‘That is enough fentanyl to kill 50 million people, or Oregon’s population, 11 times,’ the US Attorney’s Office said in a press release.
Illegal alien drug cartels + Woke Portland allowing open drug use = Americans dead.
What a tremendous scheme here from the Democrats.
They’re just selling the dope that Americans won’t…
After cattle country stresses over President Donald Trump’s plan to flood the market with cheaper foreign ground-beef trimmings, the 47th president posted that four giant processors have made life “miserable” for American ranchers and that he is authorizing farmers to process their own food if desired or necessary.
“Trump wants to remove some of the red tape and costs associated with setting up USDA inspected facilities for small producers or areas of the country that don’t have USDA processors to be able to sell their protein to consumers in a legal way,” grazier Derek Lange told Just The News last week.
“Consumers want to buy beef from ranchers and be a part of their story.”
Jeanine John Taele, 38, had more than 200 pages of writings that included schedules for the first lady and members of the president’s USSS detail, The Associated Press reported, citing information revealed during a Los Angeles County court hearing Wednesday.
The New York Post reported that prosecutors said Taele had seven notebooks containing 208 pages of drawings and sketches of Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles in Rancho Palos Verdes, lists of USSS schedules, details about individual security personnel and copies of Melania Trump’s schedule.
Yet somehow Teale has been declared mentally unfit to stand trial…
Austin’s one woman crime spree. “Austin Woman Arrested After Police Find Hundreds Of Suspected Stolen Bank Cards, Keys And Mail.”
A routine arrest in North Austin developed into a much broader investigation after police said they discovered a large collection of mail, payment cards, checks and postal keys believed to have been stolen, according to Yahoo.
Austin police arrested 42-year-old Elizabeth Rozo on Aug. 25 after officers tracked her to an apartment complex near Tech Ridge Boulevard. Authorities were looking for Rozo because she was wanted on a warrant stemming from a credit or bank card abuse investigation.
Officers with the department’s North Metro Tactical Unit reportedly watched Rozo leave the apartment complex and enter a vehicle. They followed her before initiating a traffic stop.
The investigation expanded significantly when officers searched the vehicle. Police said they recovered roughly 400 bank cards believed to have been stolen, along with nearly 300 gift cards. Investigators suspect at least some of the gift cards had been purchased using compromised bank cards.
Officers also discovered two counterfeit Arrow Keys, a type of master key associated with U.S. Postal Service mail equipment. Such keys can potentially be used to open certain shared mailboxes and other postal receptacles, making them particularly valuable to people seeking access to mail belonging to multiple households.
Evidence from the vehicle led investigators to secure a warrant for Rozo’s apartment. The second search produced considerably more material, according to police.
By the time officers finished searching the vehicle and residence, authorities said they had collected thousands of pieces of suspected stolen mail and hundreds of checks. They also recovered about two dozen identification documents that police believe were either stolen or fraudulently produced.
Investigators reported finding 17 stolen postal keys in addition to the two counterfeit keys discovered during the investigation. Authorities have not publicly explained how the postal keys were allegedly obtained or identified how many mailboxes could have been accessed with them. Police also have not announced an estimate of how many people may ultimately be connected to the recovered mail and financial documents.
Not The Bee imitates the Babylon Bee: “Canadian PM says he will resume trade talks ‘when the Americans stop doing memes.'” This went over exactly as you imagined it would.
Some measure of justice: “Former Houston Police Officer Pleads Guilty to Falsifying Affidavit That Led to Deadly 2019 Drug Raid.”
A former Houston police officer pleaded guilty to abusing his authority as law enforcement in his falsification of information used to obtain a search warrant that resulted in a no-knock raid and two murders for which the officer is already serving time.
Gerald M. Goines pleaded guilty to making false claims, including that a resident had sold illicit drugs to a confidential informant and that additional other customers had bought drugs from the resident in prior weeks, in an affidavit that was necessary to obtain a search warrant — known as a “color of law” violation.
Goines was a senior narcotics officer with the Houston Police Department (HPD).
The no-knock warrant was executed in January 2019 and became known as the Harding Street Raid when officers shot and killed a couple in their home. The raid added fuel to the fire in regards to particular scrutiny of HPD, with activists and some Houston City Council members calling for the department to be defunded or similarly financially impacted. This occurred amid anti-police protests that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
Due to his role in leading the raid, Goines was charged with the murders of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, who were shot and killed alongside their dog during the drug bust. He was indicted in 2019 on two counts of murder and found guilty at trial, and is currently serving a 60-year prison sentence as a result.
Goines did not fire the fatal shots. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the summer of 2026 that the officer who did so, Felipe Gallegos, was protected from a civil rights lawsuit under qualified immunity after he was previously indicted for Tuttle’s killing, a charge that was ultimately dismissed due to alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
Two middle schools in Austin Independent School District (ISD) received their fifth failing A–F accountability rating from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) last week.
Under the Texas Education Code (TEC), “If a campus is considered to have an unacceptable performance rating for five consecutive school years, the commissioner shall order: (1) appointment of a board of managers to govern the school district; or (2) closure of the campus.”
The district originally had three middle schools with four consecutive failing ratings: Burnet, Dobie, and Webb. While Burnet and Webb earned F ratings, Dobie earned a D rating for this year.
According to TEA, a D rating does not break a consecutive failing streak — only an A, B, or C rating will stop the count. A D rating instead pauses the count until there are three D ratings in the chain, at which point the failing streak resumes.
Over the past school year, Austin ISD has made headlines for numerous challenges. In November, the district approved 10 school closures and 24 state-mandated turnaround plans for struggling campuses. After a projected $181 million budget deficit, the district was forced to make $205 million in cuts.
The district also announced the last-minute closure of Paredes Middle School on July 30, shortly before the start of the school year.
Austin ISD applied for Senate Bill 1882 partnerships for Burnet, Dobie, and Webb, which would have allowed the district to partner with an open-enrollment charter school or institutions of higher education approved by the TEA. These partnerships can receive increases in state funding and are exempt from certain accountability measures for two years.
Segura told KXAN News that the accountability pause was “not the driving factor” for the partnership, but rather the resources the partnership made available.
The TEA denied Austin ISD’s request in May, but said that the district could continue the partnerships, just without the state incentives. Austin ISD announced the dissolution of the partnerships for the three middle schools in July.
In an August 13 letter to parents, Austin ISD Superintendent Matias Segura addressed the possible state takeover, saying that “challenges remain.”
One failing grade for a school should be a wakeup call. Two demands heads should roll and get AISD to make whatever changes are necessary to fix the problem. Five is educational malpractice.
Microstamping cartridges isn’t just unconstitutional, it’s Ineffective.
Ohio Democratic congressional candidate Brian Poindexter was arrested for allegedly swallowing a rock of crack cocaine at a traffic stop after he was stopped by police and for slapping a man at a baseball game according to police records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Poindexter, a city councilman and former union organizer running against the embattled Republican congressman Max Miller in Ohio’s Seventh Congressional District, has a criminal rap sheet dating back to the late 1990s, the records show.
On Jan. 23, 1998, Poindexter, then 18, was pulled over by police officers at a street corner known for heavy drug activity in Cleveland, according to the police report. Poindexter allegedly pulled out “some small objects from his coat pocket and put them into his mouth” and “began to swallow them.” The officer tried to retrieve the objects from Poindexter’s mouth, and the two men fell to the ground in a scuffle. The officer eventually recovered a “rock of suspected crack cocaine,” according to the records.
Another towering intellectual genius batting for Team Blue. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
NVIDIA has agreed to acquire open source AI company Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000.
Justice for Tupac? “Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis convicted of masterminding Tupac Shakur’s murder 30 years after rapper gunned down in Vegas.”
The man accused of orchestrating the murder of legendary rapper Tupac Shakur — one of the entertainment industry’s most captivating crimes — was found guilty by a Nevada jury.
Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, learned his fate in a Las Vegas courtroom on Monday after about two weeks of trial, as Shakur’s emotional family members passed tissues around and embraced, the New York Times reported.
The conviction of Davis, a former high-ranking “shot caller” in a Los Angeles chapter of the Crips gang, marked the first person to face justice for Shakur’s murder, which went down on a Las Vegas street on the night of Sept. 7, 1996.
Shakur, a pioneer of the burgeoning rap scene, was driving in a car when another pulled up alongside and blasted him with a hail of bullets. He died days later at 25.
Davis was not accused of shooting the gun which killed Shakur, but prosecutors argued he gave it to the gunman — long presumed to be his nephew Orlando Anderson, who died in a gang shootout two years after the murder — and orchestrated the entire attack.
The NBA on Wednesday announced severe punishments for the LA Clippers — including the loss of five future first-round draft picks, a fine of $30 million and a yearlong suspension of owner Steve Ballmer — for violating salary cap circumvention rules in a case involving star Kawhi Leonard.
In a statement, the NBA said a near-yearlong investigation “found a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by the Clippers organization, a prior offender of the salary cap circumvention rules.”
As a result, the Clippers must forfeit first-round draft picks in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033. In addition to the $30 million fine, Ballmer is suspended from all league and team activities for one year “for knowingly seeking to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities,” among other issues. President of business operations Gillian Zucker is suspended without pay for one year, and president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank is suspended without pay for six months.
Huge Supreme Court win, Ukraine switches from Wildberries to Ozon warehouses, yes, DSA are damn dirty commies, more Second Amendment progress, Ted Cruz’s book on Clarence Thomas is out, Aussie gets 15 years for shooting a carnival air gun, remembering Dolly, and the NFL finally takes the Pro-Bowl to a farm in the country.
The Supreme Court just handed President Trump a massive victory in the fight to secure America’s elections. The justices cleared the way for his executive order restricting mail-in voting to move forward, and after months of Democrat officials trying to bury the policy in court, the administration finally has room to breathe.
This is a big deal.
The SAVE America Act is still stalled in the Senate, blocked by Democrats who aren’t even hiding the fact they have zero interest in verifying that voters are who they say they are. Trump’s executive order just got a green light from the nation’s highest court anyway. Election integrity doesn’t have to die in the legislative graveyard to make progress.
Trump signed the executive order, called “Ensuring Citizenship Verification And Integrity In Federal Elections,” in March 2026. It directs his administration to build lists of eligible voters and orders the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists. The Postal Service laid out its implementation plan last week, but the clock is ticking. Some states start sending mail ballots in just a few weeks, leaving the administration little time to get this right before the midterms. More court challenges remain possible.
The victory is real, but it’s not the finish line.
Mail balloting has been a target of Trump’s for years, and for good reason. The Heritage Foundation has long argued that mail-in ballots are more susceptible to fraud, coercion, and chain-of-custody problems than in-person voting. Anyone who lived through the 2020 presidential election, one of the most disputed elections in history, watched that vulnerability play out in real time.
It’s official: California just criminalized publicly exposing fraud.
our tax dollars are paying for fraud, and if someone like Nick Shirley exposes this fraud he, not the fraudster, could get in trouble.
More from Nick:
These politicians need the fraud to continue and they sadly use immigrants to do so often. They fund nonprofits and NGOs with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year for immigration services, including free healthcare, and have now made ‘immigration support service providers’ essentially a protected class in California.
For example, if I film a hospice or a ‘learning center’ with no patients receiving millions through Medicaid and the owner gives me a paper saying I cannot publish the video, I cannot publish it. If I publish it to expose them and they claim it caused them ‘fear’ or a third party threatens them, I face a minimum $4,000 civil fine plus the legal fees of the individual or group suing me.
This bill was created by the Attorney General’s wife and co-sponsored by CHIRLA, a nonprofit that has received over $80,000,000 in taxpayer dollars for ‘immigrant support services.’ Do you understand how this works yet? When the fraud is exposed, they create new laws to protect the fraudsters and penalize those who expose it.
By signing this bill, the Governor and California politicians expose themselves as the corrupt politicians they are. This is not the end; the fight has just begun. More to come soon; this is far from over.
An unconstitutional prior restraint First Amendment violation that will be struck down instantly the first time California tries to enforce it.
If it weren’t for voter fraud, welfare state fraud, crazy trannies, violent criminals and pandering to radical Islamic anti-Semites, the Democrat Party wouldn’t have any business model at all…
“Our goal is Communism,” David Jenkins, a member of DSA’s National Political Committee, said in 2023.
DSA member Cea Weaver is New York City’s tenant tsarina. She posted via X in December 2017, “Elect more communists.” The next year, she demanded: “Seize private property.”
Weaver’s boss is Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In his Jan. 1 inaugural address, he stated: “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist.” He told a DSA Zoom call in 2021: The “end goal” should be “seizing the means of production.” Mamdani also said, “The abolition of private property … is preferable to what is going on right now.” These comments loudly echo Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ cornerstone collectivist text “The Communist Manifesto.”
The magnificently named Darializa Avila Chevalier rode Mamdani’s endorsement all the way to the Democrat nomination for New York’s 13th Congressional District.
“I’m a democratic socialist,” she boasted June 29 on MS Now. She also wants to “seize the means of production,” as she advised in a not-quite-deleted September 2019 X post. She confessed that December: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag.” In April 2020, she wrote: “Most of the theory I have read is communism but the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.” The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserved 3,657 such messages that Chevalier thought she had erased.
For months, the assumption that the Strait of Hormuz was Tehran’s ultimate card dominated commentary on the war.
As a narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and a substantial share of liquefied natural gas had historically passed, it appeared to be a chokepoint Iran could close or severely disrupt at will. It did not need to destroy every tanker. Hitting a small percentage with drones, cruise missiles, speedboats, or mines would spike insurance rates, deter crews and companies, and effectively shut the strait without continuous physical control.
This idea was not new for 2026. It had long been a feature of the Iranian strategic posture, treated as both a military instrument and a political myth-proof that even under pressure Tehran retained a decisive lever over the global energy system. Parts of the Western media and independent analysts amplified the same narrative.
Relying on incomplete open-source shipping data, especially once vessels began sailing dark, many concluded that the United States had been caught unprepared and lacked a realistic path to reopen the waterway. Hormuz, they argued, was effectively closed or closable at Iran’s discretion. That framing was powerful, but also incomplete.
The assumption that Iran’s detection and targeting system could not be dismantled without dramatic escalation proved wrong. Under the U.S. Central Command, also known as CENTCOM, and with significant involvement from the Fifth Fleet and Air Force components, the United States ran a sustained effort to degrade the sensors Iran needed to find and hit ships.
Iran relied on mobile truck-mounted radars, drones, cruise missiles, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) speedboats, and naval mines. Inside the narrow strait, ships move in relatively predictable lanes. Iran combined active radars with passive electro-optical and infrared cameras on elevated terrain and islands such as Qeshm, Larak, and Abu Musa.
Mobile radars would radiate briefly to locate shipping, then shut down and move before anti-radiation missiles could arrive. Once a ship’s approximate position was known, strike systems could be sent to search.
The vulnerability was that every radar emission could be detected. American aircraft responded systematically with anti-radiation missiles while visual and intelligence efforts located the passive sensors. This was the core of what some involved called “draining the swamp.”
Iran had redundancy, but the number of sensors was finite. Hundreds of precision strikes gradually reduced Iran’s ability to see traffic in the strait. As the detection layer thinned, the effectiveness of the strike systems declined with it.
Parallel efforts neutralized mines with unmanned vessels and declared the southern lane near Oman largely clear. Convoys moved under escort, often at night with the automated information system (AIS) off. Arleigh Burke-class destroyers with Aegis radars and standard missile (SM)-family interceptors formed the backbone; drones and Apache helicopters armed with laser-guided rockets provided additional cover. American ships also engaged IRGC speedboats that closed on the convoys.
On the commercial side, the United States addressed insurance barriers. In early March, President Donald Trump directed the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide political risk insurance and guarantees for maritime trade.
The DFC, working with the Treasury and CENTCOM, established a revolving reinsurance facility of roughly $20 billion-later expanded with private partners including Chubb-focused on hull, machinery, and cargo cover. Early uptake was limited. As Iranian success rates fell, more vessels joined.
Results have been significant. CENTCOM has reported assisting well over a thousand commercial vessels and moving hundreds of millions of barrels since the spring. Independent trackers often showed lower numbers because much of the traffic sailed dark. Pre-war throughput was 20 million to 21 million barrels per day.
Flows through Hormuz remain below that, but combined with the Abu Dhabi-Fujairah pipeline and Saudi Arabia’s pipeline to Yanbu in the Red Sea, volumes recovered enough to keep oil prices in the $85 to $95 range-elevated, but far from the predicted catastrophe.
Followup: “Satellite Imagery of Multiple Ozon Warehouses Destroyed by Ukraine.”
“Big Blast as Drone Storage is Hit By Drone & Project 05060 Patrol Boat Destroyed in Crimea.”
“Ukraine Destroys Rare Su-33 (First Destroyed), MiG-29 and Orion Attack Drone At Anapa Airport.” This was just the other side of the Kerch Straight Bridge. The Su-33 is normally a carrier based aircraft, but since Russia’s only aircraft carrier has been out of service since 2017, they’re doing much desk landing these days.
The surprise visit by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit.
The trip was spy-agency chief John Ratcliffe’s first publicly known visit to the Russian capital. It followed new U.S. intelligence assessments, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, that Russian President Vladimir Putin could try to test the resolve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years.
U.S. officials are concerned that Putin, squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home, could launch an assault ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion, likely on a Baltic nation, the Journal reported.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice conceded that Americans are allowed to carry in Postal Service buildings.
Snip.
On August 18, a federal judge ruled against Biden’s “ghost gun” ban, saying it violates multiple parts of the Constitution….Judge Reed O’Connor ruled Biden’s “Ghost Gun” rule violates the 2nd and 5th Amendments,
Decision by decision, the Second Amendment is being upheld and gun rights expanded.
More progress: “CDC restores info showing how many good guys with guns stop bad guys after Biden removed it.”
Concerning: “Maryland felony cases against Zizian trans death cult members abruptly suspended. After 18 months of prosecution, Maryland abruptly put its cases against three Zizian trans cult members on indefinite hold. Officials have not publicly explained why.”
The cases against cult leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota and subordinates Michelle “Jamie” “Alex” Zajko and Daniel “Hastur” Blank were made inactive on Aug. 14; All scheduled future trial dates were canceled.
LaSota, Zajko and Blank were arrested together following a national manhunt on Feb. 16, 2025 in rural western Maryland. They were found with a cache of weapons in their two box trucks. They had spent years moving around the country as members of the Zizians, a radical transgender cult who has been linked to at least eight violent deaths.
The three initially faced only misdemeanor trespassing, firearms and obstruction charges after an elderly Frostburg-area property owner reported that they had arrived in box trucks and asked to camp on his property.
Authorities later added charges involving the alleged illegal possession and carrying of concealed and loaded firearms.
LaSota, a biological male who identifies as a woman and uses the name “Ziz,” is the founder and ideological leader of the Zizians. The group is made up of transgender vegan extremists, several of whom have elite educational backgrounds in science and mathematics. Members embraced an esoteric ideology combining leftist transgender politics, anarchism, rationalism and veganism.
Snip.
Though the state charges have been suspended, LaSota is being held on a federal detainer request on a federal indictment of being a fugitive from justice in possession of firearms and ammunition. On Tuesday, he was transferred into federal custody at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia.
Zajko, meanwhile, is awaiting extradition to Pennsylvania. She was charged in June with murdering her adoptive parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, on New Year’s Eve 2022. The case had gone cold for years before the surprise announcement by prosecutors in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
Authorities allege Zajko traveled from Vermont to her childhood home in Chester Heights on the night of her 30th birthday and participated in the execution-style killings.
Bad news for justice in Colorado: “Former Colorado Bureau of Investigation DNA analyst Yvonne Missy Woods pleaded guilty to four felonies — cybercrime, perjury, attempting to influence a public official, and forgery, after facing 102 felony charges tied to misconduct in 58 cases dating back to 2008. Woods worked at CBI for 29 years, from January 1994 to November 2023, and was qualified as an expert witness more than 500 times. A routine audit in late 2023 uncovered anomalies in her work; an internal investigation found she purposefully deleted DNA data to skip required testing steps. Retesting of roughly 3,000 affected cases cost the state an estimated $11 million. Among the high-profile cases she handled was the 2003 Kobe Bryant sexual assault investigation. ”
“ICE Arrests 1,328 Illegal Aliens in DC, Virginia, Maryland in 14 Days. Of those arrested, almost 400 illegal immigrants had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, including a Salvadoran national wanted in Richmond, Virginia, on a murder warrant.”
“Other crimes included rape, sexual assault, kidnapping, DUI, robbery and attempted murder.” Also: “They also arrested members of MS-13, 18th Street Gang, and Tren de Aragua gangs.” MS-13 and Tren de Aragua we’ve covered here before. According to Wikipedia, “The 18th Street Gang, also known as Eighteen St, Barrio 18, Mara 18, or simply 18 in North America, is a multi-ethnic (largely Mexican and Central American), street gang from Los Angeles, California. It is one of the largest street gangs in Los Angeles, with 30,000–50,000 members between the United States, Mexico, and Central America.” Evidently they’re enemies with MS-13.
“Lottery Boss Appears in Court over $95 Million Scandal. Former Texas Lottery Executive Director Gary Grief faces a first-degree felony charge of abuse of official capacity tied to the controversial 2023 jackpot.”
Former Texas Lottery Executive Director Gary Grief appeared in a Travis County courtroom Friday morning as the criminal case stemming from the controversial 2023 Lotto Texas jackpot moves forward.
Grief appeared alongside his attorney before District Judge Dayna Blazey in the 167th District Court. Prosecutors and attorneys representing the entity formerly known as the Texas Lottery Commission were also present.
Court records show Grief waived formal magistration Friday. Another hearing concerning his personal-recognizance bond was set for October 16.
Shortly after Friday’s proceedings, Travis County District Attorney José Garza formally announced that a grand jury had indicted both Grief and the now-defunct Texas Lottery Commission for abuse of official capacity.
The indictments were handed down April 21.
According to Garza’s office, the charges stem from the April 22, 2023, Lotto Texas drawing and allege that the commission, along with high-level management officials Ed Rogers and Clay Kidd, intentionally and knowingly misused government resources.
The DA’s office alleges the conduct was authorized by Grief, who was serving as the commission’s executive director at the time.
The indictment concerns the drawing in which a New Jersey-based lottery purchasing operation acquired nearly every possible number combination and won a $95 million jackpot.
Grief faces a first-degree felony charge of abuse of official capacity involving $300,000 or more.
The whole affair stinks to high heaven, and I have to think at least some Lotto Commission employees were in on it.
“Judges Recommend Regulators Reject Proposed 765-kV Line. The Public Utility Commission must now decide whether to accept the judges’ recommendation to reject the proposed multibillion-dollar transmission line projects.” “The judges concluded the utilities [Oncor and the Lower Colorado River Authority Transmission Services Corporation] did not establish that the projects are necessary and failed to comply with notice requirements designed to give affected landowners a chance to participate before the application was filed.”
The plot thickens. “Iowa Attorney General Says She’s Taking California to the Supreme Court Over Paramount-Warner Bros.”
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird wrote in an op-ed for The Daily Wire that she is suing California for leading the charge in the lawsuit against the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger.
“California is once again trying to be the country’s regulator. And once again California is defying common sense to raise costs around the country,” Bird wrote. “That makes this a dispute between states, and the Constitution says those can only be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“Australian man faces 15 years in prison for using toy gun to win carnival prize for daughter.” He was an ex-felony prohibited from using guns, but getting busted for a carnival air rifle seems way, way excessive.
How Simon Whistler runs his YouTube channels. He outsources everything except direction and presentation, expands his winners and ruthlessly culls his losers. It’s smart business, but largely antithetical to what I watch YouTube for. (Previously.)
Weirdly enough, the animated film Lesbian Space Princess seems to be hated by everyone. See, a film with that title could be highly profitable in porn…
Trump’s winning in Iran, Russia’s losing in Ukraine, Democrats committing fraud left and right, the data center debate rages on, a crappy movie in China gain sudden popularity because it’s crappy, and Orlando PD get to wrestle an alligator.
The “rhetoric” coming from both sides of the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz has “caused considerable confusion and doubt,” CNN’s David Goldman understatedly observed. Yet, at present, “The evidence is clear,” he conceded: “Iran is losing much of its control over the critical waterway.”
One month ago, the number of commercial ships transiting through the strait via the U.S. approved route along the Omani coast was close to zero. Today, however, over 80 percent of the vessels that have made it through the strait are taking the U.S.-authorized lane. And even though the United States has not responded with kinetic force to every Iranian attack on commercial traffic in the strait, sometimes to the consternation of America’s Gulf partners, that has not dissuaded countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates’ tankers from making “dark traffic” runs on the strait.
CNN could not independently verify Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s claim that “combined oil transits through the strait and rerouted around the waterway totaled around 15 million barrels per day,” which approaches the pre-war average of 20-million barrels. But it couldn’t gainsay the experts. As one industry analyst conceded, “It increasingly looks like Iran has at least partially lost control of the strait.”
The Iranian regime is feeling the pain. As Hot Air’s Duane Patterson explained, the economic conditions on the ground inside the Islamic Republic are catastrophic. “Iran’s economy is currently experiencing around 90 percent inflation, and it turns out the worst may be yet to come,” he wrote. Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Miad Maleki concurs. “Nearly every part of Iran’s oil economy,” he wrote, “owes massive, growing sums to each other, with no real money moving through the system to pay any of it back.”
The gas lines are growing, and the petrol that Iranians are allowed to buy may soon be rationed. Iranian authorities are triaging their resources by prescheduling hours-long blackouts. The regime is ramping up executions and cracking down on dissent as the prospect of economic collapse brings with it the risk of renewed civil unrest.
Brooklyn Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher (D-50th District) wants New Yorkers to believe that walking out of a CVS with a fistful of stolen toothpaste isn’t a crime. It’s a “biological need.”
Yes, really.
Gallagher, who represents Greenpoint and other parts of northern Brooklyn, made her case Thursday at a news conference outside Manhattan Criminal Court, flanked by fellow far-left officials and activists from Court Watch NYC. The group said it monitored 360 arraignments over four days and found that more than half involved misdemeanor offenses. Gallagher used those numbers to argue shoplifters swiping basic necessities shouldn’t be prosecuted at all.
“Most of what we saw were crimes of poverty-people who are stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like, you know, soap,” Gallagher said. “And that means if you’re stealing those things, you need them.”
Funny how all those films of riot never show people stealing soap and toothpaste, just flat screen TVs and Nikes. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Salman Ahmed Elmi was charged last week with three counts of aiding and abetting by swindle and five counts of aiding and abetting by false representation.
He made his first court appearance on Monday. Authorities say some of Elmi’s co-conspirators at Reva Health in Golden Valley have connections to a sex trafficking ring bust last week.
Elmi is accused of billing Medicaid for more than $1 million in services that were not provided or not eligible. Reva Health provided autism services and adult rehabilitative mental health services.
“The Minnesota Department of Human Services awarded Elmi an ‘Outstanding Refugee Award’ in 2021.” Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that “Outstanding Refugee” is an award for those that stole the most taxpayer money to give to Democrats?
FBI agents seized electronic devices from former Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) at the San Francisco airport on Saturday and then raided his home in connection with an investigation into sexual assault allegations against him, according to several reports.
Federal authorities executed a search warrant at Swalwell’s home in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, law enforcement sources told CNN and the Associated Press.
The FBI declined to comment.
Swalwell resigned from Congress and suspended his campaign for California governor in April after a former staffer came forward with allegations that he had sexually assaulted her twice, including once at a hotel while he was in New York City for a charity gala in 2024.
Three other women then accused Swalwell of sexual misconduct as well. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department opened criminal investigations into Swalwell in response.
At the time, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg encouraged “survivors and anyone with knowledge of these allegations to contact our Special Victims Division.”
The reports that the FBI’s investigation into Swalwell is picking up steam comes days after the White House Transparency Task Force released FBI files indicating Swalwell previously admitted to having “physical relations” with suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang on a “handful of occasions,” providing confirmation of the public sphere’s longstanding suspicion that a sexual relationship had transpired.
Ukraine continues its war on Wildberries. “Best Wildberries Strike Yet! Koledino Near Moscow–Biggest Wildberries Hub in Russia.”
“Ukrainian forces hit at least five workshop buildings at Russia’s Kombinat Kamensky defense plant in Rostov region, penetrating several layers of air defenses from Pantsir to S-300 systems. The plant produces solid rocket fuel for Uragan, Smerch and Tornado-S MLRS, as well as other missile and aviation systems. Key workshops had anti-drone protection and were surrounded by earthworks. Several air-defense vehicles were also hit.”
The Russian fuel situation has gotten so bad that even Russian newspapers are talking about it. “As of the 16th of August, across Russia, 28.1% of petrol stations had fuel. A week before, it was 41%.” Imagine more than two thirds of stations having no gas and long lines at the ones that do.
The State Department worked with World Vision to distribute $2 billion in global health foreign assistance even though an Israeli court convicted the nonprofit’s Gaza affiliate operations manager of sending up to $50 million to Hamas in 2022. Separately, the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) provided nearly $80 million to 14 organizations linked to terrorism and extremism.
The Middle East Forum (MEF) recently reported that 14 terror-linked and extremist organizations, led by CAIR, collected nearly $80 million from HHS through the Refugee Resettlement, Health, and Mosque Renovation grants. Through this fund, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) California chapter received the most of any Islamist group, collecting $42.2 million in funding from the HHS to provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees.
Concerning: “Chinese Spy Official Who Is Also A Trained Sniper Buys Property Overlooking White House.”
🚨CCP intel official Philip Qiu, who is trained as a SNIPER, bought an historic building overlooking the White House.
“Liberal white woman fights fascism by defacing national memorial to soldiers who died fighting Hitler.” ‘This morning, we are filing two felony charges, Depredation Against Property of the United States and Destruction of Veterans’ Memorials, in Federal District Court against Melissa L. Farris, offenses that carry penalties of up to ten years in prison.” TDS strikes again.
How is this legal? “Karen Bass brags that Los Angeles will use tax dollars to provide a 6:1 match for every dollar donated to her campaign.”
Karen Bass is very worried about losing her mayoralty to left-winger Nithya Raman, who squeaked past Spencer Pratt in the primary election due to a bunch of election shenanigans, and Bass has an interesting campaign strategy.
Using city tax dollars to fund her campaign!…
The city of Los Angeles “donates” money to Bass’s campaign in a matching program? If you give $10, the city chips in another $60? And she’s pushing this program?
Through the foreign-donation-taking ActBlue, no less.
Per the City Ethics Commission (I kid you not), the city charter allows for “public matching funds.”
Left-wing group Common Cause California brags about “strengthening” this public match fund in 2019.
The program is intended to help less-funded candidates get access to funding, but in actuality, all it does is take YOUR tax dollars to fund politicians you hate.
The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.
1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.
2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.
3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it.
This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.
4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name.” Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.
6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.
7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.
Kurt Schlichter: “The Death of Academic Fraud Jason Arday Won’t Shut Us Up.”
Fake Professor Jason Arday was found dead in the wake of being exposed as a complete fraud, and if it were my choice, he would still be alive and suffering the humiliation that should be the result of his crimes. I would prefer that he did not likely choose to kill himself instead of facing the consequences of his actions. My preference is irrelevant. If he decided to do himself in, it’s crushing for his wife and kids, and that was a selfish, cruel, and stupid decision. But it was his decision, as was his decision to commit fraud upon fraud. I don’t celebrate his death, and his death changes nothing. We’re not going to stop rooting out the charlatans.
Of course, the entirely predictable response of the institutional left to his cowardly and apparent self-deletion has been to insist, loudly and with quivering outrage, that his death is our fault. You see, we normal people pointed out that he lied about his background, his achievements, his credentials, and his work. The fact that we did what a functioning institution should’ve done itself outraged his boosters, so these moral illiterates now invert the moral calculus to keep the exposure of academic fraud from happening again. Arday lied pathologically and endlessly, enabled by a ridiculously solicitous academia, then likely killed himself when his lies were exposed. Obviously, the villains are the people who did not lie and did not choose to end his life.
And you’ll never guess their key accusation in a million years.
Okay, you guessed it: RACISM!
Snip.
Regardless, it was entirely predictable that the left would use his unfortunate demise to try to shut us up, to place all criticism of woke charlatans off limits because the subject of the critique might decide to do something desperate. They can’t help themselves but act out irrationally, you see. The fact that this tactic deprives the minority of any agency is no shock; there’s no racist like a leftist, who considers minorities to be nothing more than political marionettes unable to control their own actions. We’re supposed to give them a pass because the targets of our criticism have no agency. It’s like that NSFW scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff keeps the townspeople from lynching him by sticking a gun to his head—“He’s just crazy enough to do it!” Except this time the townspeople were not trying to lynch an innocent man and didn’t back off, and he did pull the figurative trigger.
We’re not going to play their game. We’re not going to hold fire for fear of feelz. We’re not going to ignore the truth lest the liar lash out at himself or others. Sometimes the truth hurts, but the only people the truth hurts are people exposed doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The truth is more important than feelings. And the truth is more important than Arday’s life. If the choice we are presented with is that Jason Arday will go on living a lie and degrading our civilization by doing so, or that Jason Arday might hurt himself, it’s Option 2 every day of the week. We’re not going to be held hostage or intimidated or shamed into silence and, therefore, complicity.
Texas has three federally recognized Native American tribes: Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, located in the western part of the state in El Paso; the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, located near Eagle Pass along the Rio Grande; and the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, located in the eastern part of the state near Livingston.
And two of those are along the Mexican border, which means drug smuggling is a big problem.
I’m going to quote a largish chunk here just so I can tag the various companies.
In June, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to require data centers to pay for their own electric infrastructure costs, scuttling at least one project planned for East Texas.
Then, earlier this month, Abbott asked these agencies to audit all data center projects in the process of connecting to the Texas grid. According to his directive, data centers in the pipeline must provide and verify information about their water usage; their noise, light, and traffic mitigation efforts; how they plan to obtain electricity; whether they receive taxpayer money; and the real identities of their owners.
A flurry of affirmative replies ensued, including assurances from some of the best-funded users and most prolific developers of data centers in the world.
Many of these companies have already made use of a sales tax exemption for data center equipment — a 13-year-old state law passed before the remote work boom of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) this decade propelled the industry well past the state’s expectations.
Here are the data center companies that have agreed to comply with Abbott’s standards, cross-referenced with the state’s list of companies that benefit from the tax break.
QTS Data Centers
On August 6, Virginia-based Quality Technology Services (QTS) “applauded” Abbott’s “efforts to increase transparency on power use, water and resource consumption, and community considerations associated with data center development.”
QTS data centers built after 2019 use fans rather than water for cooling, according to the company.
The company operates three facilities in Texas and has three more in the pipeline, according to its website. The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts certified one QTS facility, a 56-acre campus in Irving, to benefit from the state sales tax exemption.
Vantage Data Centers
Vantage Data Centers sent a letter of support to Abbott on August 7.
The company, based in Denver, Colorado, only lists one active data center in Texas, at an undisclosed location in Shackelford County. However, it has secured a sales tax exemption for 12 projects listed by the comptroller, all for Oracle.
Skybox
Texas-based Skybox Datacenters agreed to Abbott’s standards on August 7.
The company has built nine data centers around the state. Besides one in Wichita Falls, all are in the Dallas, Austin, and Houston metropolitan areas, according to its website. The comptroller’s list of qualifying data centers doesn’t include a project with Skybox in the name or one associated with its address at 3131 Turtle Creek Boulevard in Dallas, based on a search of the state’s franchise tax database.
Digital Realty
Digital Realty stated on August 7 that it would comply with Abbott’s standards. The Austin-based company claimed in its statement to be “the world’s largest cloud- and carrier-neutral data center platform.”
Digital Realty operates more than 300 data centers that serve companies including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Nvidia and IBM. Twelve of its 14 Texas data centers are in the Dallas area, its website shows.
Stream Data Centers
Dallas-based Stream Data Centers agreed to Abbott’s standards on August 7.
Altogether, nine Stream data centers are either active or in development across Texas, with one on the outskirts of Houston, three in San Antonio, one in Austin, and four in the Dallas area.
Mara
Mara agreed to abide by Abbott’s standards on August 7.
The Florida-based company operates a Bitcoin mining fleet, and it “colocates data centers with power sources to convert stranded energy into digital capital,” its website states.
The company name doesn’t appear on the comptroller’s list of qualifying data centers, nor do any subsidiary companies registered under the address of its Florida headquarters.
Rowan
Rowan Digital Infrastructure, another developer based in Denver, issued a press release in support of Abbott’s orders on August 7.
The company owns and operates four data centers in Texas that benefit from the sales tax exemption, including one in Temple for Meta and another in Cinco for Google.
Meta
Meta, the California-based parent company of Facebook, pledged to comply with Abbott’s standards on Monday.
Meta’s three Texas data centers are in Fort Worth, Temple, and El Paso, according to its map.
Multiple data centers owned or used by Meta benefit from the state’s sales tax exemption. One subsidiary company, Polmer LLC, owns the certified data center in Temple and occupies two other data centers on the comptroller’s list of certified projects. The El Paso facility is owned by a Meta subsidiary, Wurldwide LLC, which also makes use of the exemption.
OpenAI and Oracle
California-based company OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, agreed to comply with Abbott’s standards on Monday. Oracle, also based in California, made the same commitment on Tuesday.
OpenAI is collaborating with Oracle and SoftBank on Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure project based in Abilene and funded in part by chipmaker Nvidia. Lancium, a company backed by New York-based investment firm Blackstone, is constructing the facility, according to its website.
Eleven Lancium data centers and projects appear on the comptroller’s list, spanning Fort Stockton, Turkey, Childress, and Abilene. Seven projects in Abilene are associated with Stargate, with Oracle listed as an occupant.
Core Scientific
Core Scientific issued a press release in support of Abbott’s directives on Monday.
The company, based in Miami, Florida, operates three data centers in Texas: one in Austin, one in Denton, and one in the Callahan County town of Cottonwood, according to its website.
All three benefit from the state tax exemption, the comptroller’s list shows.
Google
The California-based Big Tech titan expressed support for Abbott’s standards on Monday.
The comptroller lists Google as the owner or user of nine data centers that benefit from the sales tax exemption.
CleanSpark
Data center developer CleanSpark Inc. agreed with Abbott’s standards on Monday.
The Nevada-based company doesn’t publish a comprehensive map or list of its data center locations, but as of February, it owned two plots of land in Brazoria County and Austin County with plans to develop facilities there, according to an investor relations press release.
Neither CleanSpark nor the only Texas entity registered to its corporate address, Eagles Nest 138 LLC, appear on the comptroller’s list of data centers.
EdgeConneX
Virginia-based EdgeConneX announced support for Abbott’s standards in its Tuesday press release.
The company doesn’t specify how many discrete data centers it operates in Texas, but it’s only active in the Houston and Austin areas, according to its online map.
The state has certified two EdgeConnex projects for the tax exemption, both in the Austin area.
SB Energy
SB Energy sent Abbott a letter on August 6 expressing support for his directives and publicized it on Tuesday.
The Redwood City, California-based company is building a facility in Milam County in support of Stargate, with Orion listed as an occupant on two projects that benefit from the state sales tax exemption.
Data Center Coalition
The Data Center Coalition, a trade association that represents data center companies, expressed support for Abbott’s directives on Tuesday.
David Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to hiding federal records from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Morens, a senior adviser at NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022 under Dr. Anthony Fauci, was charged by the Department of Justice in April with five counts related to the scheme.
He agreed to a deal with federal prosecutors this week that would see him plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses or to defraud the United States. The charge carries up to five years in prison.
Snip.
The indictment came after the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic found evidence that Morens had used his personal email to discuss Covid-19’s origins and National Institutes of Health grants with EcoHealth Alliance, including a terminated coronavirus grant, in an attempt to keep the communications hidden from hypothetical future FOIA requests.
The committee obtained a communication between Morens and EcoHealth President Peter Daszak in which Morens wrote, “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
Why it was almost like their was a conspiracy of secrecy against the American people…
Abdulloi Toshpulodzoda left the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute (NVMHI) on July 6 for an authorized 48-hour pass. He was required to return two days later, but he never did, FOX 5 reported, citing court documents.
Instead, Toshpulodzoda traveled to Washington Dulles International Airport and boarded a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul before continuing to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, court documents show.
Snip.
FOX 5 reported that Toshpulodzoda had previously been allowed to travel to Washington, D.C., in 2024 to obtain a passport, with support from the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.
Sorry, a what? Passport? And then they gave him a 48-hour pass? And then they were surprised that he fled the country and never came back?
Well done, everyone.
You may not be surprised to learn that it was the office of far-left Steve Descano, the prosecutor for Fairfax County, that allowed him to get the passport.
The Trump admin is suing Descano for releasing violent criminals. You may recall that Descano went viral for allowing a registered sex offender to change in the girls’ locker room at multiple HIGH SCHOOLS because the sex offender now identifies as a woman.
Very suspicious: “Bastrop City Council Holds Official Workshop 100 Miles Away from their Constituents.”
On August 7th, the Bastrop City Council conducted official workshops not in Bastrop (where one might reasonably expect), but more than one hundred miles away in Fredericksburg. The posted agenda lists the location as the John Wm. Klein Meeting Room at 115 N. Crockett Street in Fredericksburg, roughly a two-hour drive from the city those officials were elected to serve.
And no, these were not informal “retreats” for city council members to relax and blow off steam. These were formal City Council workshops covering the very decisions that hit taxpayer’s wallets and daily lives hardest: the city budget, setting the tax rate, Hotel Occupancy Taxes, capital projects, the Master Transportation Plan (including an East/West connection north of Highway 71), water and wastewater planning, street projects, and “Future Goals” that include a recreation center, expanded fire and police service, data center policies, and Legislative “advocacy.” An extensive list of hot-button issues all to be discussed far away from their constituents.
State Rep. Stan Gerdes (R-Smithville), whose district includes Bastrop, correctly called out the problem: “The City of Bastrop is holding a City Council meeting hours away in Fredericksburg, making it nearly impossible for the people they represent to attend and participate.” He noted the agenda’s weight on budget, tax rate, data centers, and surveillance technology and announced plans to file legislation requiring city council meetings to be held inside the city they serve so residents can actually show up, speak, and hold officials accountable.
Security camera company Flock Safety has announced changes to its privacy safeguards amid public opposition to use of the devices and concerns about law enforcement abuse.
However, U.S. Rep. Keith Self (R–McKinney) told Texas Scorecard that although these changes are welcome, Flock is obviously “trying to gain acceptance and put lipstick on a pig amid the intense pushback they have received from Americans across the nation who are rightfully concerned about their privacy.”
“The bottom line is Americans do not want to be spied on, and they reject the surveillance state operating in America,” said Self. “The Fourth Amendment is not a suggestion. Federal and state legislation are still needed to ensure the government cannot access this data without a warrant—and that taxpayer dollars are not spent purchasing or installing this invasive spyware. That’s why Congress needs to pass my bill, the PRIVACY Act.”
Self filed the PRIVACY Act last month. It would require federal law enforcement to obtain official warrants before accessing or querying data collected by state and local systems, including automated license plate readers.
Powered by artificial intelligence, Flock cameras have been a hotly debated topic across the U.S., with concerned Texans requesting that state lawmakers create guardrails for the technology during the upcoming legislative session.
Since law enforcement officials do not need a warrant to access the Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) database, citizens are raising concerns about potential Fourth Amendment violations.
Among the technology updates is a new default setting of 7-day data retention instead of the previous 30 days. This change is based on Flock’s analysis that all searches “without a full plate are done within a week.”
The Critical Drinker/Gamer covers a hacker group penetration of Rockstar games, evidently including full playable source code of the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6. They’re even threatening to release the ending if Rockstar don’t promise to eschew the greedy enshitification of games (like ending physical media) that’s now standard practice in the industry.
Niu Lai is a sleeper hit in China, mainly because the animation is so bad, something that might have been a 3D animation demo reel in 1994. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
In news that may be of interest only to me, both BattleSwarm and Futuramen had huge upticks in Views this week, at least ten times normal traffic, though a smaller uptick in unique Visitors, and I notice no single post generating such traffic. I can only assume some AI scanned the entirety of the site.
“DeSantis Explains To Newsom Secret To Counting Ballots In One Night Is Not Committing Fraud.”
“Kentucky Derby Convenes Committee To Determine What Is A Horse.”
Finally, an SPLC arrest, Iran is broker than broke, a crazy commie loses despite a huge poll lead, more Russian Wildberries, ships, and conveys blow up, more of that voting fraud that never happens, and Israel dirtnaps more Hamas scumbags.
Authorities in California arrested Heidi Beirich, a former chief financial officer (CFO) at the Southern Poverty Law Center, on fraud charges.
The indictment alleges Beirich helped funnel money to white supremacist groups through informants. She also supposedly had a romantic relationship with one of them.
From CNN:
The woman, Heidi Beirich, previously ran the SPLC’s project tracking hate groups in the US and allegedly “oversaw payments of donors’ money” to people inside of these hate groups, according to the indictment. Prosecutors say she shared a bank account with one of those sources, which included funds from the SPLC’s payments.
“I believe she was part of the effort to open bank accounts in completely fictitious companies’ names and make payments to individuals for reasons that that were not accurate as as described,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference Wednesday. “This is exactly what we said would happen in a case like this, which is that our investigators and the US attorneys and the agents working the case will can keep on working it even after the initial indictment.”
Oh yeah, Blanche was confirmed as Attorney General. Maybe should have had a link on that, but, eh.
The grand jury indictment against the SPLC came down in April 2026, including 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
“In order to covertly pay the individuals, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities,” the DOJ wrote in a press release. “The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the individuals. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.”
Beirich is “Employee-2” in the indictment, who worked as SPLC’s director of intelligence between 2012 and 2019.
SPLC said America had a racism problem. It did. It was the SPLC…
Not a whole lot of kinetic news out of Iran this week, but there are additional signs that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s economy is cracking.
Despite the bluster from Iranian officials on social media, it should come as no surprise that the country is not doing well economically. From the beginning of the conflict to current day, Iran has been dealt an estimated $270 billion to $300 billion in total damage due to a steady barrage of strikes, including numerous infrastructure targets from bridges, highways, railways, airports, etc.
The three-month-long US blockade on Iran’s oil exports have also taken a toll, with national oil output dropping from 2.2 million bpd to less than 300,000 bpd. It is likely that there has been some long term damage to the regime’s oil wells and they have lost approximately $6 billion in oil revenues so far.
With a general information blackout in place, getting a proper estimation of the damages can be difficult. However, in recent months many Iranian leaders and media sources have indicated a dangerous shift in the stability of the country. The situation has become so volatile that citizens are reportedly turning to theft in order to get their hands on basic necessities including food.
Iranian newspaper Jahan-e Sanat has reported increased theft of basic groceries over recent months, with store workers linking the trend to rising poverty. Related reports say meat is in short supply, there is reduced consumption of staples, subsidy shortfalls, and broader poverty pressures.
Analysts note that while full state collapse or famine has not yet occurred, the combination of high food inflation, currency weakness and job losses is placing severe strain on households. Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian, seemed to confirm the decline last week when he noted that the country was facing economic “difficulties and problems,” while claiming the enemy was trying to provoke protests.
At Iran’s 33rd Conference on Monetary and Banking Policies (around June 2026), he questioned why people wake up to find their purchasing power has fallen and stated there are “hundreds of ways to overcome the economic impasse.” He noted that policymakers take people’s money and “return it with reduced value.”
Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati presented a recovery roadmap and acknowledged an ongoing GDP contraction. He stated that “the combination of war and cruel sanctions has posed serious challenges to the country’s economy. Most importantly, people’s livelihoods have been severely affected because various sectors of the economy have been impacted by sanctions.”
He also cited inflation at around 53%, which appears to be a underestimation of the real currency destruction taking place.
Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani has discussed infrastructure damage (e.g., bridges, tunnels, gas and electricity capacity losses), adjustments to gasoline rations, and challenges with subsidy payments disrupted by banking issues or cyberattacks.
These admissions are often wrapped in claims of resiliency despite the crisis, but the biggest danger (inflation) has yet to fully play out. SCI data for the Persian month of Khordad (ending ~June 21, 2026) showed overall year-on-year inflation of 88.6% (up from pre-escalation levels around 50%). Food inflation reached 134%, with oils/fats at 278%, red meat/poultry at 178%, and bread/cereals at nearly 139%.
The rial hit record lows of around 1.5–1.9 million per USD at various points during the war. This has amplified import costs and eroded purchasing power.
Crippling infrastructure damage and currency devaluation might help to explain Iran’s desperate insistence on charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. If their oil industry is facing a multi-year setback and damage to infrastructure is extensive, tolls on shipping through the strait may be their only source of economic recovery.
There seems to be just enough juice left in the Corrupt Wing of the Democrat Party to rise up and defeat the very worst candidates of the insane wing, as Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong lost.
Yesterday, faced with a potential gubernatorial nominee who hates a bunch of American holidays, Wisconsin Democrats pulled it together and got just enough votes to nominate Milwaukee County executive David Crowley instead of the DSA candidate, Francesca Hong. As of this writing, Crowley has a bit more than 313,000 votes, and Hong has a bit more than 310,000. The Associated Press called Crowley the winner at 2:34 a.m. local time.
Keep in mind, recent polling had Hong with a lead of 18 to 29 percentage points.
7 months ago Francesca Hong voted against a bill that made it illegal for teachers to groom their students for sexual purposes
Here’s what happened: A 30-year-old teacher messaged a 13-year-old student of his every day for six months and talked about how he wanted them to be together, she had a nice body, and he was jealous when she talked to other boys. He also sent her pictures of himself lying shirtless in bed
So the cops arrested him but when they went to charge him, they realized nothing he did was actually illegal. They never made sexual contact and no pictures were exchanged that were explicit enough to qualify under Wisconsin state law. This guy was actively trying to rape a 13-year-old student and there was no law forbidding his conduct
He wound up being charged with a bunch of disturbing the peace charges and only spent six months in prison for spending half a year abusing his authority as a teacher to manipulate a 13-year-old girl into having sex with him. He is not a convicted felon – since all the charges were misdemeanors – and is not on the sex offender registry
The Wisconsin State Assembly responded to this by drafting a bipartisan bill that made it a felony to engage in any course of conduct clearly and obviously intended seduce or lure a child into engaging in sexual acts or exchanging illicit images. It passed 193-6 and was signed into law by the Democratic governor. Francesca Hong voted no.
4 months later the first person was charged under the new law. He was 36-year-old man who met a developmentally disabled 16-year-old in a public park when she was 13 and spent the next three years trying to manipulate her into running away from home so he could make her his live-in sex slave.
To recap: Earlier *this very year* Franesca Hong was one of only six people to vote against a bill that made it illegal to take affirmative action designed to lure a minor into sexual acts and the very first person the bill Hong voted against was used to arrest was a guy who tried to rape an underage girl with Down Syndrome
Marxist streamer Hasan Piker has emerged as an increasingly visible, if unofficial, spokesman for the Democratic Socialists of America’s rapidly expanding political action network. He campaigned for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong while cultivating close ties with socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
From an electoral-risk perspective, Piker is becoming a liability for Democrats. His far-left, anti-American rhetoric provides Republicans with what we called “a gift” last week. Even Hillary Clinton warned on Friday that the GOP’s “anti-communist messaging is very effective.”
Piker calls on his followers to “kill capitalists”:
Hasan Piker calls on his followers to kill capitalists:
“Yeah kill them! KiII those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”
Piker: “We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna f**k your sisters and then your daughters. We’re here to destroy the White Race, Bitch.”
Hasan Piker says he wants to FLOOD illegals into the United States so they can "f*ck your sisters and daughters" to "destroy the white race"
I am demanding the Democratic Party voice PUBLICLY that they denounce Hasan Piker's comments.
A federal appeals court has delivered another victory for Texas’ landmark 2021 election integrity law—the same legislation that prompted Democrat lawmakers to flee the state in an unsuccessful attempt to block its passage.
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday reversed a lower court ruling that blocked nine provisions of Senate Bill 1, including requirements related to voter identification for mail ballots and assistance provided to voters.
The three-judge panel sharply criticized the lower court’s handling of challenges to the law.
“In short, we have been playing an exhausting game of Whac-A-Mole to correct the district court’s mishandling of this case,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote after recounting a series of previous Fifth Circuit decisions reversing or staying rulings against SB 1.
Oldham opened the opinion with an equally forceful defense of mail-in voting safeguards.
“It has long been established that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud,” wrote Oldham, adding that voting by mail “jeopardizes election integrity and democracy itself.”
Passed by the Legislature in 2021, SB 1 established new safeguards, including requiring voters casting ballots by mail to provide an identification number or Social Security number that matches state records.
The law also established procedures for voters to correct defective mail ballots and imposed requirements on individuals assisting voters, including an oath that they did not coerce or intimidate the voter and disclosure of their relationship to the voter.
The legislation became the centerpiece of a months-long political battle at the Texas Capitol.
Democrat lawmakers first broke quorum near the end of the 2021 regular legislative session to kill an earlier version of the election legislation. When Gov. Greg Abbott called lawmakers back into a special session, more than 50 House Democrats left Texas for Washington, D.C., again denying the chamber a quorum.
The effort ultimately failed, and lawmakers returned to Austin. SB 1 was subsequently approved by the Legislature and signed into law by Abbott.
The decision is the latest in a series of Fifth Circuit victories for the state over challenges to SB 1.
In 2025, the appeals court reversed separate permanent injunctions against provisions of the law challenged under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the latter ruling in June.
Earlier this year, the Fifth Circuit also reversed another permanent injunction against SB 1 provisions challenged under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed a two-count indictment charging 11 individuals for orchestrating a massive, decade-long marriage fraud network that arranged over 1,000 sham marriages.
Federal prosecutors described the operation as one of the largest marriage fraud prosecutions in U.S. history, spanning “from 2016 through July 2026 and generating tens of millions of dollars in illegal revenue.”
The criminal scheme primarily aimed to secure fraudulent green cards and lawful permanent residency for foreign nationals, predominantly citizens of the People’s Republic of China, the DOJ noted.
According to the 21-page indictment unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants marketed their services through social media, word of mouth and targeted advertising.
Foreigners reportedly paid the enterprise up to $100,000 each to facilitate a fake marriage and process green card applications. In turn, the network recruited U.S. citizens to act as spouses, paying them up to $30,000 per arrangement, while recruiters pocketed commissions of around $5,000 for every participant enrolled.
Federal officials explained further how the syndicate functioned as a “full-service” operation designed to systematically evade federal immigration checks. Facilitators hired officiants and photographers, staged wedding ceremonies — sometimes at local restaurants where participants wore traditional attire to fabricate authenticity — and generated fake documentation.
Ukraine hits “multiple Black Sea Fleet ships at Novorossiysk, including a Project 22160 patrol ship, a Kilo-class submarine, and the Admiral Makarov, an Admiral Grigorovich class frigate, as well as grain export terminal facilities.
Ukraine destroys a train carrying North Korean ballistic missiles some 6,000 miles away on the Transiberian Railroad. Depending on where on the Transiberian Railroad it was hit, that could put a real crimp on Russian logistics coming from China, one of its last lifelines.
Russian oil refinery 6,500km away from Ukraine goes up in flames, but it probably wasn’t a Ukraine strike.
That thing that never happens happened again. “Non-citizen sex offender given green light to vote by Dearborn poll officials.”
OMG [O’Keefe Media Group]’s undercover journalists investigated two Michigan registered voters identified as non-U.S. citizens in federal court and DHS records. One of them, Afshin Masheli, is identified in federal court records as an Iranian national and non-U.S. citizen. DHS has previously featured Masheli on its publicly released “Worst of the Worst” list, which highlights noncitizens arrested by ICE for serious criminal offenses. According to United States District Court records, Masheli is a registered sex offender.
OMG proved that at Masheli’s assigned polling location, election workers confirmed a voter registration under his name appeared in the poll book and stated that a registered voter listed there could cast a ballot. Our undercover journalist spoke to Afshin Masheli himself and Masheli said he planned to vote later that day.
Our investigation also identified another registered voter, Fazlollah Haritash, whose federal records identify him as a non-U.S. citizen. Public court records and Michigan’s public sex offender registry showing the criminal convictions, and the registry lists him as incarcerated. At the polling location associated with Fazlollah Haritash’s voter registration, an election worker confirmed that a voter registration under his name appeared on Michigan’s voter rolls.
More tax incentives to hire foreigners over Americans. “Employers Using J1 Student Visas for Seasonal Work Pay NO Social Security Taxes.”
When a company hires J1 student temporary or season employees, they do not have to pay the 7.5% FICA or Social Security tax on the wages.
If a company hires a seasonal American student, they have to pay the 7.5%. If the company hires a foreign student, they don’t. This creates a perverse incentive for private equity firms, companies or corporations to hire foreign seasonal workers…
Apparently, this is now the common approach within the hospitality industry to save money and increase profit from payrolls. Unfortunately, this approach puts young Americans at a disadvantage when seeking summer or short-term seasonal employment.
For fiscal Year 2025: The U.S. State Department processed 506,142 applications and successfully issued 451,803 J-1 visas.
Among the recent criminal sentencings and convictions:
— Jacob Daniel Terrazas, 31, of Paramount, Calif., was sentenced July 22 to ten months in federal prison “for throwing chunks of cinderblock at Border Patrol agents and injuring one of them during a protest that turned violent,” according to a Justice Department press release. Terrazas pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of simple assault on a federal officer.
— Yachua Mauricio Flores, 23, a Mexican illegal immigrant living in Los Angeles, was sentenced August 3 to 37 months in federal prison “for pouring two bottles of lighter fluid onto a burning California Highway Patrol (CHP) vehicle and throwing an electric scooter over a freeway overpass near officers during an anti‑immigration law enforcement riot in a downtown Los Angeles,” according to a Justice Department press release.
— Ismael Vega, 42, from Los Angeles, was sentenced July 27 to 37 months in federal prison “for throwing rocks and ignited debris at California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers trapped underneath a downtown Los Angeles freeway overpass … during a violent anti-immigration law enforcement protest last year,” according to a Justice Department press release. Vega pleaded guilty to one count of obstructing, impeding, and interfering with law enforcement during a civil disorder.
On Friday, the IDF disclosed the recent elimination of Hamas company commander Muhammad Mushtaha, who committed atrocities on October 7, 2023, and kept several Israelis in captivity. “The IDF now confirms the elimination of the terrorist Muhammad Bassam Muhammad Mushtaha, who was struck two weeks ago in the northern Gaza Strip,” the military said in a statement on Friday. “Muhammad Mushtaha served as a company commander in the Shati’ Battalion in the Hamas terrorist organization׳s military wing.”
Snip.
On Thursday, an Israeli airstrike killed another Hamas commander who took part in the October 7 Massacre. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) “struck in the area of Gaza City and eliminated the terrorist Jamal Mahmoud Abu Kamil, a commander in the Hamas terrorist organization who infiltrated Israeli territory during the October 7th Massacre,” the IDF announced on Friday. ”
From Dwight comes the heartwarming story of Gina LaPlaca, former mayor of Lumberton Township in New Jersey, who, with her husband Jason Carty, was indicted for voting fraud, namely collecting fraudulent signatures to compete in a Democrat primary…only to come in third of three.
Brandon Herrera and Wes Virdell buy silencers. “GOA Members to Make History with First Suppressor Transfers Without NFA Registration Since 1934.”
Ann Coulter: “Google AI will NOT cite The Daily Mail.” Specifically, Google will not find a 2013 Daily Mail article about Trayvon Martin and drug use, even if you search for the exact name of the article. The Ministry of Truth is hard at work hiding those pesky facts from you. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Well: “Jason Arday, ex-Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism, found dead in UK week after investigation launched.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
One of the videos showed an alleged assault that was reported on July 30. The video appeared to show [Diquan] Hunt punch a woman on a sidewalk off East Boulevard in Charlotte’s South End before running away.
The person suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries. It was not immediately clear why Hunt punched her, but it does appear to be random.
In the video, it appears you can hear Hunt say to a woman passing by, ‘Don’t wave to me.’ Hunt appeared to hit the woman and can be seen standing over her, screaming at her and asking her, ‘You still talking?’
Hunt was taken to a local medical facility for treatment. He will be transferred into the custody of the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office once he is released and charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
Bonus: “This is Hunt’s tenth arrest since 2023.” Of course Mecklenburg County DA Spencer Merriweather is a Democrat…
Bad guy threatens gas station clerk after being denied alcohol because he didn’t have ID. Good guy with gun: DELETED. Bonus: Perp’s name: “Ofa’tangikivaha Angilau (a classic Utah name right there).”
“Bitcoin Red Team Says AI Is Finding Critical Exploits Across Core Projects. A volunteer security effort says it has scanned 150 Bitcoin repositories, disclosed more than a dozen vulnerabilities, and is building an open-source AI platform to automate software security reviews.”
Royce White, the Rockets draftee turned Republican congressional candidate has declared for the WNBA, along with ex-NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom. How far is the WNBA willing to go to tie itself into knots rather than offend the radical left by just declaring that no one with XY chromosomes can play in the WNBA?
More Iran War spin cycle, Ukraine hits more oil refineries and Wildberries, more welfare state fraud, more Fauci follies, more Democrats behaving badly, and one anime lover does something really, really stupid.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
(Note: Somehow an unfinished version of this got published and one of Bluehost’s little timeouts temporarily prevented me from unpublishing it…)
I should have a link on Iran here, but as far as I can tell it’s the same cycle: 1. Iran attacks neighbors or a ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz, 2. U.S. pounds the snot out of them, 3. President Trump announces we’re close to a deal with Iran, 4. Iran announces usual lies (deal gives them complete control over the strait, U.S. promises to hand them a big pile of money, President Trump promises to pray to Mecca five times a day, etc.). Set spin cycle to repeat next week.
Why go to war with Iran now? When we have so many problems to solve — still — at home, and with the midterms looming?
If you just said “Because Israel” go and sit down. No, sit ALL THE WAY DOWN. And stay there, quietly, while the adults talk. You’ve been sold a fable by people who would love to split up that alliance in order to destroy both countries piecemeal. And yes, a lot of the people in this country you trust are in the pay of those people or alternately truly vulnerable to manipulation.
Yes, Israel is at war and has been at war. Not out of some desire of being a local hegemon — after all, they gave back a lot of territory in the early 2000s in the hope of buying peace for their people for all the good it did them — but because they would like to survive. And even then, they were soft-handed to the point of insanity until they got the wake up call of 10/7. Not responding to that wake up call would have been suicidal. Apparently they are not that. This makes them neither an evil scheming nation nor manipulators of US politics. Go sit all the way down, and think shame you allowed the likes of China and Russia and dissatisfied Arab elements (now their leadership is becoming marginally saner) to manipulate you.
However, our war with Iran has nothing to do with Israel except insofar as Israel has provided able support in it, taking down the “Hamas fighters” Iran would have sent against us when we moved against Iran.
And if you think that Trump just up one morning and decided to go to war with Iran because he’s just that crazy, you have the president completely wrong. He had a public persona that is a little unpredictable. This I think is intentional just as I think Reagan’s “the bombing will now begin” was “accidentally open mike.” If you believe that, I have some bridges to sell you. They might be underwater, but great property.
Trump’s philosophy of government is “Make money, not war.” And I don’t mean making money for himself, though setting the US as the leader of the economic world definitely will end up in his children and grandchildren being richer. And ours too, think on. What I mean is that he uses money the way other presidents used war. He makes it profitable to be on good terms with the US, rather than beating people into not hurting us. By and large, it works.
Until you come to something like Iran. An “Islamic Republic” established with heavy propping by the USSR and still used as a proxy by Russia (and China. And every bad actor who wanted to use them.)
None of which would be an immediate problem, necessitating war. The world is full of crazy little countries, armed to the teeth and with evil intentions towards everyone starting with their own people.
Except for three things: 1- Iran’s evil intent is real and proactive. They declared war on us (And yes, Israel, but remember Israel is “little Satan” to our “Big Satan.”) They’re not just squatting on their territory, murdering their own people and muttering “touch me and you’ll die.” They actively want to eliminate us. (And Israel, but honestly, mostly us.) They believe a final, massive war, will bring about their end times and paradise for the faithful. And they are, yes, sincerely religious. At least the leadership. 2-They either had a nuke, or were very close to having one, and as we have learned through their bombing every one and their cousins, they actually and for real had delivery means. To the US? who knows? And anyway, with a nuke and open borders, there are many means of delivery. 3- Pallets of cash given to them by Obama, which greatly accelerated the nuclear program. Which we supposedly have maybe thoroughly degraded. Maybe. Apparently the terrain and capacity of the Iranians…. it’s difficult to ascertain that, or to be sure they won’t be up to their games next week absent thorough regime change.
In other words, our war with Iran right now is very simple: Because the enemy gets a vote. And so do others who would love to be the enemy if we give them an opening and who are now at BEST “adversaries”.
Because if we give in to the “peace at all costs” people we’ll likely go back in a year or two. And if two who knows who’ll be in charge or what they’ll use “war time emergency” to do. Remember the covidiocy?
Now imagine that we have Kamala, or G-d forbid AOC in charge when Iran hits NYC or Chicago, or Denver, or any of our big cities. Or three or four of them.
Imagine millions dead, and the US suddenly on a war footing. Imagine what a “Democratic socialist” would do in an environment 10 times what the post 9/11 fervor was, when speaking out against war is political and perhaps physical suicide. Or, you know, you don’t have to imagine. Go and study the unvarnished presidencies of Woodrow Wilson or FDR and you’ll KNOW.
Beyond the fact that China is running out of time to make with aggression. Their demographics don’t support a long wait to go to war with us. They must do it soon. But to do it now would be suicide. To do it after Iran hits us with a nuke and we’re in disarray (particularly, if G-d forbid we have a Democrat in charge.) … golden opportunity. (And don’t tell me there’s no chance of a democrat in 2028. The right is riven by discord being sown by enemies domestic and foreign, and a lot of duckies on the right fall for it every single time.)
THAT is why we are at war with Iran now. And why Trump is doing it (he said he couldn’t risk a president he couldn’t be sure of facing this, remember?) right now, regardless of political price. Because undoing the damage that Obama wrought is essential if we are to thrive or even — just — to survive as a nation.
The DOJ Fraud Division, U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Pennsylvania Attorney General today announced criminal charges against 19 defendants, including owners and employees of home care companies, for their alleged participation in various fraud schemes involving over four million dollars in claims to Medicare and Medicaid.
The Pennsylvania Attorney General also announced a plea agreement involving the final defendant in a previously-charged 21 defendant case involving over $1.7 million in claims.
Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, U.S. Attorney David Metcalf for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and senior federal and state officials hold a press conference announcing a significant health care fraud takedown and a new Anti-Fraud Initiative in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Commie Jihadi wins. “Abdul El-Sayed Wins Michigan Democratic Senate Primary. With 99% of the votes counted, El-Sayed defeated Haley Stevens 48.5% to 47.5% (14,893 votes).”
The Associated Press called the Michigan Democratic primary for socialist and anti-Israel candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
With 99% of the votes counted, El-Sayed defeated Haley Stevens 48.5% to 47.5% (14,893 votes).
El-Sayed’s victory is a major defeat for the Democratic establishment.
Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) or endorsed by the socialists have won House primaries in Colorado and New York. Most Democrats brushed aside concerns that the socialists have started taking over the party despite those victories.
Will the Democrat party change its position now that El-Sayed won a statewide primary?
El-Sayed loves to hang out with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved 9/11.
The socialist claimed he never said he wanted to defund the police, but CNN dug up a 2020 interview where he said, “I believe we do need to defund the police.” People even discovered El-Sayed deleting past social media posts with anti-police rhetoric.
He also holds the usual socialist ideas: High taxes, Medicare for All, abolish ICE, open borders, etc.
Of course, El-Sayed hates Israel and AIPAC. He admitted that he struggles “with the question of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state.”
El-Sayed wouldn’t say anything about Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death because many Muslims in the state are sad.
Given that this and many other clips of El-Sayed have gone viral since he won the primary earlier this week, it might be dawning on Piker that the Islamic vote in Dearborn isn’t going to be enough to carry a statewide election.
Today on X, he was furious again, but this time in his attempt to backpedal from one of his most infamous statements: that America ‘deserved’ 9/11.
this is unbelievably disingenuous, I'VE personally apologized for the words that i used BACK IN 2019. every candidate i've appeared alongside has done this. we all know this is a cynical way to justify associating the 1st muslim senate candidate with "islamic style terrorism" https://t.co/PqCAgXPJbw
Oh yes, because 2019 was so long ago, and saying that “America deserved 9/11” was so uncontroversial back in those dim, misty days of 2019. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Meta fined $567 million for harming the mental health of kids. And that was just in New Mexico…
“Huge Drone Strike on Petrochemical Plant and Ufa Oil Refinery: Huge Fire. [I]n Nizhnekamsk, Tatarstan, a massive fire is seen in the industrial zone of Nizhnekamskneftekhim after an explosion, probably due to a system overload after a series of UAV attacks on the industrial zone. ”
The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Thursday advanced a resolution to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress.
The eight-to-five party line vote came in response to Fauci repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at a hearing last week to avoid Republicans’ questions regarding diary entries previously released by the committee. Those documents revealed the former head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases gave the lab-leak hypothesis for the origin of the coronavirus more credit in private than he did in public at the beginning of the pandemic.
Something is at war with us, us being regular citizens who want things to work and to be left alone. We’re slow to react because we think in terms of nations. Our enemies are mafias that wear governments like a cloak to defeat our eyes and fly our flags to disarm our minds. So I think the way to think about Anthony Fauci sitting there in front of this committee today is we are governed by mafias. He is a made man. I think he’s just clearly a made man. And that means we don’t have the ability to touch him.”
This could get spicy: “Paxton Investigates Financial Ties Behind Childhood Vaccine Recommendations. The attorney general is seeking information about how the nation’s largest pediatric group develops its vaccine guidance.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating how a pediatricians’ association determines its vaccine recommendations and whether financial incentives have influenced its guidance.
Founded in 1930, the American Academy of Pediatrics has helped shape childhood vaccination recommendations nationwide and has worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on its childhood vaccine schedule since 1995.
“If the American Academy of Pediatrics is giving medical guidance that is fueled by financial incentives, we will expose and put an end to this unlawful behavior,” Paxton said.
Earlier this year, Paxton launched investigations into multiple vaccine providers, examining whether they failed to disclose bonuses and other financial benefits tied to the number of vaccines administered.
He also accused pediatricians of denying care based on vaccination status and attaching physicians’ wages or employment to vaccine quotas.
Nearly three years after the October 7 massacre, the Israeli military and security forces continue to hunt down and eliminate the terrorists responsible. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) scored major operational success over the weekend, taking out several senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists involved in the attack.
The IDF, supported by the Shin Bet security agency, killed a commander of Hamas’s Nukhba terrorist force who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. A strike in central Gaza “eliminated the terrorist Abdallah Adnan Taha Abu al-Tayf, a Nukhba commander in Hamas’ military wing,” the IDF announced. “The terrorist infiltrated Israeli territory during the October 7th Massacre. Throughout the war, he actively participated in combat against IDF troops.”
In a separate strike, the “IDF eliminated the terrorist Jalal Tsubeih, a commander in the Daraj Tuffah Battalion of Hamas’ military wing,” the military disclosed in the same statement.
An October 7 hostage taker and commander of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s (PIJ) Central Gaza Brigade was also killed in a recent Israeli strike, the IDF revealed on Monday.
The slain terrorist, Mahmoud Fatair, kidnapped 19-year-old Rom Braslavski. Rom was tortured and sexually assaulted by PJI terrorists during his long captivity. According to the BBC in November 2025, he “was sexually assaulted during his two years in captivity in Gaza.”
TPPF: “Flock Cameras Are An Assault On Your Constitutional Freedoms.”
Texans have a special way of dealing with infringements on privacy and the freedoms we enjoy.
Unregistered drones surveying our properties out in the sticks? That’s what the 12-gauge home defense system is for. Red light cameras that often prioritize revenue and control over public safety? The Texas legislature passed a law to ban that. Waiting for a glacially slow U.S. Congress to pass a Digital Bill of Rights? Federalism makes clear we had to take matters into our own hands.
Clearly, Texans understand that privacy is a fundamental prerequisite to being free—and that’s on both sides of the aisle. Polling conducted by my organization, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, suggests 9 out of 10 Texans believe as much. So it comes as no surprise that ire over Flock and similar Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) is shared by activists and advocates on both sides of the aisle.
And it also means the Texas Legislature will almost certainly do something about it next session.
ALPRs are not a new concept. Like more than one surveillance program, it began as an effort to combat terrorism, providing a novel method that allowed law enforcement to forego visual inspection and the time-consuming process of obtaining warrants and registration information. American police departments began using rudimentary ALPRs in the 2000s, arguing they “enhance their enforcement and investigative capabilities…[and] expedite the tedious and time-consuming process of comparing vehicle license plates with vehicles of interest.”
Whether unsophisticated ALPRs in the early days were a worthwhile investment is up for debate.
Proponents of Flock will point to the long history of this technology’s existence as reason to not fret over the current political landscape, but I’m not interested in that red herring. The reality is that technological shifts from simple contrast algorithms to advanced AI, pixelated cameras to high resolution photos that can capture clear shots in all conditions, and wide-angle lenses that can capture four or more times the number of lanes and cars as older cameras, have given rise to the narrative of mass surveillance.
To put into plain English, a police force in New York once boasted of capturing the license plates of 10,000 vehicles in a day; whereas a 2020 California state auditor report revealed that Sacramento’s Police Department recorded 24 times that amount, with close to 250,000 photos captured daily.
Proponents will quickly assert that these cameras only capture license plates, vehicle characteristics, distinguishing features (bumper stickers and license plate frames), and time and direction. But much like with brokers harvesting and selling your online data, it is not the individual data point has inherent value. It’s the fact that there is a stunning arsenal of these data-siphoning cameras across the nation, connecting all of those data points to generate a larger, far more invasive picture than a single snapshot in time. And this is precisely why there has been a well-documented cadre of police officers making use of this database to monitor their wives, exes, or random strangers.
As author and researcher Matthew Crawford puts it in reference to digital surveillance writ large, “The appeal, surely lies in not having to do things that we normally do for ourselves. The convenience may be worth the price; that’s for each of us to decide. But to do so with open eyes, one has to understand what the price is.”
If we are relying on an opaque, cherry-picked narrative of what personal information ALPRs can capture, how it is stored, the motive for retaining certain data, and whom it is ultimately sold or transferred to, we can’t possibly be informed enough to know the price of “enhanced safety.” Even worse, none of us even clicked “accept” to the terms of service while driving down I-35. So not only do we not know the price, we have no say in the matter.
“NY Socialist Can’t Pay Rent, Wants to Write State Budget.”
New York Socialist Brian Romero has not yet reached Albany, but he has already launched his first public spending initiative: covering his own rent.
Romero, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 34th Assembly District, launched a GoFundMe asking supporters to cover his rent and groceries while he waits to take office. The campaign sought $2,000 and collected more than $1,000 from 13 donors before disappearing Friday.
The timing was apparently a coincidence. Romero pulled the fundraiser shortly after the New York Post started asking questions.
Romero is not exactly facing a difficult general election. He won 66 percent of the Democratic primary vote, and Republicans did not bother fielding a candidate in a deep-blue Queens district. Once sworn in, he will collect a $142,000 annual salary plus a $203 daily allowance while the Assembly is in session.
But first, socialism needed a little crowdfunding.
“Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too. ‘Context bombing’ tricks hacking agents into shutting down before they can do harm.'”
Prompt injections, the malicious commands attackers embed into content to entice large language models to follow them, have been attackers’ go-to tool for turning AI platforms against their users. A well-phrased command sneaked into an email or calendar invitation is often all it takes to cause the LLM to exfiltrate sensitive data or follow other harmful actions.
Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too.
Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacking LLM to perform an action forbidden by its guardrails, the safety barriers AI developers erect to prevent it from taking harmful actions. The LLM responds by shutting down.
Examples are a prompt that orders the LLM to provide steps for developing inhalable Anthrax spores, or, in the case of LLMs from Chinese developers, make references to the iconic Tank Man from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Once the LLM encounters these forbidden commands, it no longer follows its existing commands. The researchers have named the technique context bombing.
Man foolishly threatens Texas Governor Greg Abbott over: A.) Deporting illegal aliens, B.) Eliminating wasteful government programs, or C.) Access to anime.
A Houston man faces a criminal case in Travis County for, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, threatening the Governor’s Office over a law the man allegedly said prevented him from watching an anime.
Joseph Roy Ozment, 35, faces one third-degree felony count of terroristic threat against a public servant. KXAN has reached out to his court-appointed counsel for comment.
According to an affidavit written by a DPS special agent, Ozment allegedly called the Governor’s Office on the afternoon of July 25. DPS claims Ozment left the following voicemail (KXAN has redacted the profanity in the transcript provided by DPS):
“I don’t know which one of you sons of b—-es passed this motherf—ing bill to get this damn s— blocking my motherf—ing anime, but you whole a– motherf—ers need to unpass this s—. Y’all are f—ing ridiculous with your b—- a–es. My Google account says I’m f—ing over the age of 18, and your dumba– is passing these dumba– laws. I’m a f—ing stab every godd— one of you b—-es. Unlock my f—ing anime.”
The call was made from a cell phone that DPS claimed was registered to Ozment.
The affidavit does not say which anime Ozment tried to watch or how he attempted to watch it.
Most major anime streaming websites, such as Crunchyroll, HIDIVE and Yomi, remain available to access for Texans. KXAN double-checked this Thursday.
While the state legislature has not banned anime, two laws come to mind that could have impeded the caller’s access.
The first is a 2023 state law requiring adult websites to verify the age of any visitor before allowing access to content. In response, several pornographic streaming websites simply blocked all access from devices in Texas.
Another law is Texas’ app store age verification law. It requires a similar age verification process for smartphone users who want to download software from an app store such as Google Play. There’s currently ongoing litigation over the law’s constitutionality, but the law is in effect until that concludes.
In the voicemail, the caller said their Google account says they’re older than 18 years old. That would cover the app store requirements. It wouldn’t apply to pornographic websites, which are required to have users upload their photo ID.
One stands amazed at the stupidity of a man who thinks threatening the Governor will somehow restore his ability to spank his monkey to tentacle porn.
Given the difficulties of illustrating this item with anything remotely tasteful, I’m going with an, ah, “story adjacent image.”
Cambridge academic Jason Arday, accused of plagiarism, has the a record of serial lying that would make Jon Lovitz’s Patholical Liar blush.
Running a single marathon is a great achievement. Running 30 marathons is a spectacular feat. Running 30 marathons in 35 days is something only a world-class athlete could achieve. But running 30 marathons in 35 days, and running the final nine of those marathons with a broken leg – that’s an impossible feat that would require superhuman powers. But that is exactly what Jason Arday has claimed to achieve. But that’s not all, Jason Arday’s incredible feats aren’t just limited to running nearly 240 miles on a fractured leg without medical intervention, he also claimed to have run 600 miles in six days on a treadmill (without any evidence), played both football and snooker at a professional level (a boast that was apparently taken out of context), raised over £5.5 million for charity (but can’t name a single donor), managed to go 15 years with a barely a wink of sleep, and even appeared on the famous television documentary series Seven Up! – which originally premiered a whole 21 years before he was even born. This is the story of Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, who was appointed as Professor of the Sociology of Education in 2023.
Snip.
We are meant to believe that a boy who was completely non-verbal due to autism and global developmental delay until age 11 and who was unable to read or write until 18, then went on to earn a PhD by the age of 29. This means that in just 11 years Jason managed to learn basic literacy and catch up on all those years of missed schooling, complete an undergraduate degree (which typically takes 3 years), complete two separate Master’s degrees (typically taking 1-2 years each), complete a PGCE teacher training qualification (taking 1 year) and then write a 100,000-word PhD dissertation (taking typically 3-4 years). In just over a decade, Jason had not only learnt to read and write, but condensed 12 years of higher education into a near record-breaking period of time that would prove his hyper-accelerated cognitive processing abilities were second to none. And he did it all whilst working multiple jobs and without sleeping
How did multiple UK institutions not detect Arday’s outrageous lies? Simple: Jason Arday is black.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has released its survey of the written policies of 493 colleges and universities and evaluated their compliance with First Amendment standards, which included 21 Texas institutions of higher learning.
Of the 379 four-year public institutions and 114 private institutions, FIRE gave each campus a red, yellow, or green light rating based on how their written regulations on student expression restrict free speech.
Red light institutions have at least one policy that both “clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech or bars public access to its speech-related policies by requiring a university login and password for access.” Nearly a quarter of the private schools evaluated received a red light rating, compared to roughly 10 percent of public universities.
Overall, red light ratings made up 13.2 percent of schools surveyed, down approximately 1.5 percent from last year. Since FIRE’s first report 20 years ago, red light ratings have dropped by 55 percentage points from 68.6 percent in 2006.
Rice University and the University of Texas (UT) at Dallas both received a red light rating for one of their harassment policies.
Snip.
The Texas colleges and universities that received a yellow light rating are:
