Following hot on the heels of Thanksgiving travel and the final push to put out a new Lame Excuse Books catalog next week, this is going to be a somewhat briefer LinkSwarm.
This week: The Supreme Court greenlights the Texas redistricting map, a whole lot of support behind Trump Accounts, more Tim Walz corruption in Minnesota, the January 6 pipeline bomber turns out to be a black anti-Trump radical, more Ukrainian missile and drone strikes on Russian infrastructure, another pedo teacher exposed, Netflix buys Warner Brothers, and a tsunami of horrifying sequels barrels towards movie screens. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Texas’ newly redistricted congressional map will remain in effect for the 2026 primary after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday approved a stay of a lower court panel’s ruling against the new lines.
The State of Texas had applied for a stay of that ruling by the El Paso-based federal judicial panel that came down last month, which declared that legislators illegally considered racial factors in the redraw. The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) then appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, citing many of the fiery arguments made by the panel’s lone dissenter, Judge Jerry Smith.
Before Thanksgiving, Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary stay of the ruling, pending further consideration by the full court.
Now that stay has been made permanent, pending a full appeal later on, in a 6 to 3 ruling by the court along ideological lines. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch penned a concurring opinion.
“First, the dissent does not dispute—because it is indisputable—that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple,” the trio wrote.
“Thus, when the asserted reason for a map is political, it is critical for challengers to produce an alternative map that serves the State’s allegedly partisan aim just as well as the map the State adopted. Id., at 34; Easley v. Cromartie, 532 U. S. 234, 258 (2001). Although respondents’ experts could have easily produced such a map if that were possible, they did not, giving rise to a strong inference that the State’s map was indeed based on partisanship, not race.”
They concluded, “Neither the duration of the District Court’s hearing nor the length of its majority opinion provides an excuse for failing to apply the correct legal standards as set out clearly in our case law.”
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The one-party rule of ‘Democratic Kings’ in Maryland continues to reveal an optically displeasing truth about these leftist activists masquerading as competent politicians, who are anything but, and their epic mismanagement of state finances has only occurred because of limited oversight into their radical agendas.
Fox Baltimore reports that a state legislative audit uncovered major concerns about the oversight of billions of dollars spent by Democratic Gov. Wes Moore and his rudderless leftist allies in Annapolis, who champion everything from failed climate-crisis policies to wokeism to gender identity agendas to social justice and criminal justice reforms, as well as protecting illegal aliens (new voter base) – this is anything but ‘Maryland First’…
“Most recently, a state audit revealed 42 state offices spent a total of $8.5 billion last year with minimal oversight. That audit came on the heels of a State Highway Administration audit detailing $360 million in unauthorized spending for federal projects, and a separate Social Services Administration audit revealing a lack of protections for foster care children in Maryland,” Fox Baltimore wrote in a report.
Taxpayers Protection Alliance president David Williams told Fox Baltimore journalist Jeff Abell, “It’s a problem that almost $9 billion is going to these entities and we just don’t know where the money is going.”
Williams expressed serious concerns over the findings, pointing out, “This is supposed to be a system of checks and balances. We know the checks have gone out but there are no balances to be sure the money is being spent wisely.”
He called for increased oversight, saying, “If you’re receiving taxpayer money, there has to be full accountability, and this is billions of dollars we’re talking about.”
The lack of oversight in Maryland comes as no surprise, given that the state suffers from a disastrous one-party rule of far-left Democrats who care more about upholding the globalist framework of climate-crisis and illegal alien policies.
Moore’s photo next to dark-money-funded NGO emperor Alex Soros makes it all the more clear why he and Maryland Democrats operate with a globalist framework in the first place.
The result of one-party rule has been a ballooning deficit, soaring taxes, a credit rating downgrade, and a continued large-scale exodus of residents fleeing to red states as Maryland quickly loses its charm and is on track to transform into the next “Illinois 2.0.” On top of the financial failures, power grid mismanagement has collided with surging data center demand, sending power bills through the roof.
It’s not a mystery where it went. It disappeared into the pockets of radical leftwing activists and NGOs.
An unlikely bipartisan Senate duo is spearheading a push for employers to donate to the new “Trump accounts” created under the GOP’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation package last summer.
Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Cory Booker, D-N.J., teamed up on a letter sent to Fortune 1000 CEOs on Monday encouraging their companies to contribute to the new investment accounts created for young children. Dell CEO Michael Dell and his wife, Susan, pledged a $6.25 billion donation to the accounts Tuesday that earned them a White House appearance with President Donald Trump.
The savings accounts, which are funded with after-tax contributions, were dubbed “Trump accounts” under the budget reconciliation law. The government will contribute $1,000 to the accounts for babies born this year through the end of Trump’s term.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the provision would cost $15 billion over 10 years. The Dell donation would expand the program to reach children who wouldn’t qualify for the federal contribution.
“These tax-advantaged accounts ensure that every American child is an immediate shareholder in America’s largest companies and will experience the miracle of compound growth through their lifetime,” Cruz and Booker wrote in their letter seeking corporate contributions.
Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick “Backs Trump’s Baby Investment Plan, Wants To Double It in Texas. Under the proposal, Texas newborns would receive an additional $1,000 from the state treasury at birth.”
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says Texas should create its own version of President Donald Trump’s new child investment accounts, announcing that the state should provide every Texas newborn with an additional $1,000 in publicly funded, long-term savings beginning in 2027.
The initiative mirrors and expands upon the federal Trump Accounts program created under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, which seeds every American newborn’s account with $1,000 that cannot be accessed until adulthood and grows through investment in a broad U.S. stock-market index. The accounts are intended to accumulate wealth from birth and teach families and children long-term financial planning.
In a post on X, Patrick said he “loves” Trump’s idea to invest $1,000 at birth that “cannot be spent until age 18 and must be used for education or other qualifying expenses,” and he applauded Texans Michael and Susan Dell for contributing $6.25 billion to help launch the federal program.
“If I see a great idea from the President that helps Texans, my first question is always, ‘why not do it in Texas, too?’” wrote Patrick.
He noted that about 400,000 babies are born each year in Texas and said that one of his top priorities for the 2027 legislative session will be passing what he calls the “New Little Texan Savings Fund.” Under the proposal, Texas newborns would receive an additional $1,000 from the state treasury at birth, invested in the S&P 500 in alignment with the federal program. Combined with Trump Accounts, Patrick says Texas children would receive a total of $2,000 in initial investment capital, not including voluntary family contributions.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says he’ll withhold $30.4 million from Minnesota, after a review found nearly one-third of driver’s licenses in the state were issued illegally.
In a letter on Monday, Duffy warned Minnesota officials that more than $30 million in federal highway funds may be withheld unless the state revokes any commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) that should not have been issued and addresses deficiencies in the state’s commercial driver’s license program.
According to KTSP TV, Secretary Duffy alleged that one-third of Minnesota’s non-domiciled CDLs reviewed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) were issued illegally.
Minnesota will have 30 days to revoke the illegally-issued licenses or face the loss of funding.
Secretary Duffy noted that, “Minnesota failed to follow the law and illegally doled out trucking licenses to unsafe, unqualified non-citizens — endangering American families on the road. That abuse stops now under the Trump Administration.”
“The Department will withhold funding if Minnesota continues this reckless behavior that puts non-citizens gaming the system ahead of the safety of Americans,” Duffy added.
Over 400 employees of the Minnesota Department of Human Services are accusing Governor Tim Walz (D) of failing to act on warnings of widespread fraud and of retaliating against whistleblowers.
The accusations come as federal probes are examining the theft of more than a billion dollars from programs like child nutrition, Medicaid, and housing aid and as federal prosecutors announced charges against a 78th defendant in the theft of $250 million from Feeding Our Future child nutrition program.
In a post on X, the Minnesota DHS group called out Walz for ignoring what the group called “a pattern of ignored warnings, threats to whistleblowers, and unqualified appointees prioritizing image over fixes.”
In their post, the Minnesota DHS group explains that, contrary to popular belief, they aren’t a political group but have been continually disappointed in the lack of response they’ve received as well as the governor’s response to those who have pointed out the fraud.
“We let Tim Walz know of fraud early on, hoping for a partnership in stopping fraud but no, we got the opposite response. Tim Walz systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his best to discredit fraud reports,” the group wrote.
In addition to retaliating against whistleblowers, the group claims, “Tim Walz disempowered the Office of the Legislative Auditor, allowing agencies to disregard their audit findings and guidance.”
Snip.
In their post on X, the group states that Walz is “100% responsible for massive fraud in Minnesota” and calls for taking the next step of bringing in “external auditors and new leadership.”
– a young black guy – radical anti-Trump activist – sued Trump & ICE & DHS – extreme racial justice advocate – works at his family bail bonds company that frees criminal aliens from ICE custody
Ukraine drone struck FSB headquarters in Chechnya and Livny oil depot in Oryol. The simmering resentment of Russia in Chechnya never went away, so killing a whole bunch of FSB goons isn’t going to help Russia keep a lid on the place.
“Reports say that four military-type quadcopter drones buzzed the flightpath of President Zelensky’s aircraft as it arrived at Dublin Airport on Monday and then went to buzz an Irish Navy ship. This is likely Russian drones and suggests an intelligence leak.” They also buzzed an Irish naval ship, which did jack squat about them because “the ship didn’t have air radar capabilities,” which suggests that either the ship was really small, or the Irish Navy is absolutely useless in a real shooting war. (They also say that the ship was only armed with machine guns, when they’re also supposed to carry 20mm Rheinmetall autocannons.)
“Caleb Elliott was initially arrested on October 3 and is currently in custody on charges of recording and photographing students nude in the locker room at Moore Middle School. The victim count is currently around 40 students. There have been allegations that Elliott was transferred to Moore Middle School following inappropriate behavior at a previous school, had a relationship with a student, and placed cameras inside of the locker room.”
“2025: The Year Late-Night TV Collapsed.”
As Hollywood continues to contract on several fronts, late-night shows are not as sustainable as in the past.
Colbert found that out the hard way in July. CBS announced Colbert’s “Late Show” gig will end in May of 2026. Even more dramatic? No one is slated to replace him. “The Late Show” will end as Colbert signs off.
The shocking part? Reports said the show was costing CBS roughly $40 million a year. Why would any business take that kind of a fiscal drubbing in the first place?
That came on the heels of “The Tonight Show” shrinking from five nights a week to four, “Late Night with Seth Meyers” losing his house band and several late-nighters losing their gigs.
Period.
Think Samantha Bee, Desus & Mero, Trevor Noah, James Corden and Amber Ruffin.
That, plus news that late-night TV revenues have plunged in recent years (along with their audiences), suggested Jimmy Kimmel’s prediction might come true faster than he anticipated.
Late-night TV has much less than 10 years left. This year proved it.
Kimmel nearly took his own show down. The far-Left host suggested Charlie Kirk’s killer was part of the MAGA movement without evidence or a shred of logic.
ABC/Disney sent him the bench for a week before he returned sans apology. He cried, again, but not for misleading viewers.
The Hollywood Left and the media rallied on Kimmel’s behalf, and he returned to the show to spread more misinformation.
Meanwhile, Fox News’ “Gutfeld” continued to out perform the competition on a smaller budget (and, admittedly, an earlier time schedule). That proves there’s a market for a right-leaning audiences ignored, or insulted, by the current late-night landscape.
The future doesn’t look bright for the late-night survivors. Kimmel’s contract ends in May, but he’ll likely sign a new deal before then. ABC proved it couldn’t force Kimmel to apologize for spewing misinformation, and Hollywood would rise up, en masse, anew if ABC/Disney let Kimmel walk.
Does it matter if “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” might be losing money a la Colbert? It’s clear money isn’t the deciding factor anymore given what CBS endured for far too long.
It doesn’t ultimately matter. The late-night talkers showed their cards in 2025. They’re all parts of the DNC at this point, sometimes literally.
Netflix is buying Warner Brothers for $87 billion. To quote the press release:
This acquisition brings together two pioneering entertainment businesses, combining Netflix’s innovation, global reach and best-in-class streaming service with Warner Bros.’ century-long legacy of world-class storytelling. Beloved franchises, shows and movies such as The Big Bang Theory, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, The Wizard of Oz and the DC Universe will join Netflix’s extensive portfolio including Wednesday, Money Heist, Bridgerton, Adolescence and Extraction, creating an extraordinary entertainment offering for audiences worldwide.
“Our mission has always been to entertain the world,” said Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix. “By combining Warner Bros.’ incredible library of shows and movies—from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends—with our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we’ll be able to do that even better. Together, we can give audiences more of what they love and help define the next century of storytelling.”
I’m sure the Bugs Bunney-KPop Demon Hunters crossover will be lit…
A company that provides a controversial surveillance technology to both private and public entities throughout Texas was found to have been operating under an expired state license, amid state and federal lawmakers calling for greater scrutiny of the company over privacy and security concerns.
Flock Safety, Inc. installs automatic license plate readers (ALPR) that capture the license plate number and location of each vehicle that passes by. Police can then compare the data in relation to stolen vehicles, missing persons, or other crimes, and law enforcement has successfully used the technology to solve cases.
Flock’s high-resolution cameras create a detailed file that includes other markers on each vehicle, including bumper stickers. The company’s cloud-based system also connects with ALPR data from jurisdictions across the nation in real time, allowing users to map vehicle movement.
After receiving complaints last year that Flock had been installing and operating ALPR cameras on private properties without a license since 2021, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) sent the company a cease and desist order in September 2024. Despite documented violations, DPS granted Flock a license for private operations, but that license expired on September 30, 2025.
More AI vulnerabilities to worry about. “Researchers at Icaro Lab, a collaboration between Sapienza University in Rome and the DexAI think tank, have discovered that AI models from OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic can leak illicit content across various subjects when instructions are given in poetic form. The illegal content ranges from making nuclear weapons, creating child exploitation material, and developing malware.”
Shall I compare thee to a Teller-Ulam Implosion Core?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate
Critical Drinker tours Estonia. Consider this your periodic reminder that communism sucks and that just about everything they build looks soul-crushingly ugly.
Science, not settled. A whole lot of cracks in what was thought to be settled cosmology have recently appeared, and the uncertainty may result in a revolution in our understanding of the universe, but no one knows what it is yet.
Architect Frank Gehry dead at 96. Never cared for his work, so this is just an excuse to haul out this classic Onion bit from back when they were funny: “Frank Gehry No Longer Allowed To Make Sandwiches For Grandkids.”
Adam Savage geeks out over Paramount archive storage, including a ton of weird dead media formats.
Red Letter Media has a terrifying look at all the sequels, prequels and expanded universe movies coming down the pike. The frightening thing is that some are fake, but I’m not sure any are actually off the table for Hollywood. Honestly, I think I could write Bag of Sugar: The Movie. See, first we change the name to Too Sweet. An evil corporate executive wants to destroy the magic bag of sugar that’s been in the family-owned sugar business for generations…
The Schumer Shutdown continues, “No Kings” rallies turns out to be a shuffling parade of elderly white dorks, Ukraine continues destroying Russia’s oil infrastructure, that Dutch chip company seizure has bigger ramifications than I anticipated, Canada wants to steal people’s homes, an NBA gambling scandal erupts, and you have a chance to buy a painting from the Iron Lady Collection.
Senate Democrats killed a bill proposed by GOP Sens. Ron Johnson (WI) and Todd Young (IN) that would have paid government essential workers during the extended shutdown.
It failed 54-45. It needed 60 votes to advance.
Only Democrat Sens. John Fetterman (PA), Raphael Warnock (GA), and Jon Ossoff (GA) voted with the Republicans.
“Democrats have voted down the stopgap bill 12 times.”
“How Did California Spend Billions on Homelessness Only for It to Get Worse? Two New Criminal Cases Offer a Clue.” Honestly, the first sentence supplies its own answer even without the second.
How did California manage to spend $24 billion in taxpayer money to address homelessness over the past years, only for the problem to get substantially worse?
The state has not offered any explanation since that figure was revealed in a state audit released earlier this year. But the arrest of two California men on Thursday suggests that at least some of the money may have been stolen through fraud.
Cody Holmes, the former chief financial officer at a downtown Los Angeles-based developer of affordable housing, was arrested on a federal criminal complaint charging him with mail fraud. In a separate case, Steven Taylor is accused of defrauding lenders to aid his property-flipping business. He is charged with seven counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of money laundering.
The arrests come as part of a larger federal investigation into homelessness funding fraud in the Golden State.
“Accountability begins today,” said acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli when he announced the arrests on Thursday. He said the two cases are part of a pattern of the larger misappropriation of billions in state funds meant to combat homelessness.
An audit released by the state in April revealed that California has spent more than $24 billion over the past five years to address the state’s homelessness crisis. The acting U.S. attorney formed a Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force earlier this year to investigate where those tax dollars have gone.
“The two criminal cases announced is only the tip of the iceberg and we intend to aggressively pursue all leads and hold anyone who broke any federal laws criminally liable,” Essayli said.
Holmes, 31, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $25.9 million in state grant money for Shangri-La Industries, the developer of affordable housing for which he served as CFO. That money was intended to be used to purchase, construct, and operate homeless housing in Thousand Oaks under a state project called “Homekey.”
Holmes allegedly knowingly submitted inflated, fake bank records to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), to falsely prove the company had the capacity to fulfill homeless housing projects. However, authorities say the bank accounts that Holmes said contained these funds did not exist.
Holmes is now accused of using more than $2 million in state grant money to pay credit card bills that he was associated with, including purchases at luxury retailers.
HCD had previously paid millions of dollars to Shangri-La to buy, build, and operate housing for the homeless in Redlands and King City, among other California cities.
If convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
Meanwhile, Taylor, 44, is accused of using fake bank statements and false cash representations to obtain loans and lines of credit to operate his real estate business from August 2019 to July 2025.
The Brentwood man is also accused of lying to lenders about his intended use of various properties. He allegedly lied to the lender behind his purchase of a Cheviot Hills property, telling the lender he intended to renovate and use the property himself. However, he apparently had already contracted to sell the property, which he bought for $11.2 million thanks to a loan acquired through the use of fake bank statements. He was contracted to sell the property to a homeless housing developer who was purchasing the property with public funds from the city of Los Angeles and the state of California for $27.3 million in a double-escrow transaction hidden from the victim lender and others.
If convicted, Taylor would face up to 30 years in federal prison for each bank fraud count, up to ten years in federal prison for the money laundering count, and a two-year prison sentence for the aggravated identity theft count.
I’m sure this is only the tip of the Homeless Industrial Complex iceberg…
Speaking of homeless industrial complex fraud: “FBI raids homes of Charlotte activist Cedric Dean in health care fraud investigation.”
The FBI raided the home of Cedric Dean, a well-known community activist in Charlotte’s Palisades neighborhood, on Thursday.
The search is part of a federal investigation into an alleged multi-million dollar health care fraud scheme, according to federal court documents released to Queen City News.
A spokesperson for the FBI confirmed on Thursday that agents were “engaged in court-authorized investigative activity,” but did not offer further details.
Court documents obtained by QCN reveal that Dean and his company, Cedric Dean Holdings, are accused of fraudulently billing Medicaid for mental health services that were never provided. Investigators said Dean targeted vulnerable people, including those experiencing homelessness, in exchange for their Medicaid information, offering food or temporary shelter in return.
Dean allegedly submitted inflated or false claims to Medicaid, sometimes using fake diagnoses, and paid staff and recruiters through services like CashApp. Authorities said his company billed roughly $1 million per month and operated without enough staff to actually provide care.
“They’ve lost culture… Calling someone a Democrat is an insult,” Travis noted, adding “Calling someone a Kamala voter is an insult. This is white, black, Asian, Hispanic: young men across America are over the BS that they saw at this No Kings rally.”
“Look at the dance. These are huge dorks. They have no power. They are losers. No one wants to hang out with them,” Travis continued, pointing to the event as emblematic of the party’s disconnect.
“They’re old, 1960s protesters who now are on the side that they used to protest against. They don’t realize that the world has shifted around them and they are awkward lunatics,” he further emphasized.
No Kings? They don’t mean it, as they rebranded as “No Tyrants” in countries with monarchies.
“Ukraine hit Russia’s Novokuybyshevsk refinery in Samara, one of Rosneft’s key plants, processing 8.8M tons of crude annually, about 3% of Russia’s total refining capacity,” some 1,000km from Ukraine.
Hamas is carrying out the terms of the ceasefire every bit as well as you would expect. “After Attack on Troops, Israel Hits Hamas Terror Targets in Gaza BBC. Hamas carried out ‘multiple attacks against Israeli forces beyond the yellow line.'”
Israel struck terrorist targets in southern Gaza after Hamas terrorists attacked its troops located inside the agreed ceasefire line, violating the U.S.-brokered agreement. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out airstrikes in the Rafah area on Sunday morning in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas,” the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS reported.
In response to Hamas’s action, the Israeli military targeted terror tunnels used in the sneak attacks. “Earlier, an IED or anti-tank explosion struck near an IDF engineering vehicle in the same area,” the broadcaster added. “Reports from Gaza indicate the strikes targeted Hamas positions shortly after the terror group fired an anti-tank missile at IDF forces.”
Trump’s genius wasn’t getting an agreement that would bring lasting peace for all time, it was getting the remaining living hostages out before Hamas inevitably violated the ceasefire.
“Palestinian illegal alien arrested by FBI for participating in October 7th terror attack.” “The complaint described the man, identified in court documents as Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi, as an operative for a paramilitary group in Gaza that has fought alongside Hamas.” Naturally, the media refers to him as “Louisiana Man.”
“Haitians who replaced American workers in tiny Pennsylvania town will be unemployed as factory shuts down.” “Many of these migrants were employed by a meatpacking plant known as Fourth Street Barbecue, also operating under the name Fourth Street Foods. They displaced native-born workers, drained local resources, and wired their paychecks overseas to third-world countries.”
One day after German tabloid newspaper Bild reported that Volkswagen had suspended production of the Golf at its Wolfsburg factory due to a worsening semiconductor shortage caused by a supply stoppage of Nexperia chips, the Dutch chipmaker, recently seized by the Netherlands government, warned Japanese automakers on Thursday that it may no longer be able to guarantee chip supply. The chip crisis spreading from Europe to Japan has set off alarm bells across the industry.
Bloomberg reports that the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association (JAMA) has confirmed that its members, Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, have received warnings from Nexperia about chip supply woes and are working with customers to mitigate disruptions.
JAMA cautioned that chip shortages could have a “serious impact” on global auto production and urged governments to reach a “prompt and practical solution.”
“The chips manufactured by the affected manufacturers are important parts used in electronic control units, etc., and we recognize that this incident will have a serious impact on the global production of our member companies,” JAMA wrote in a statement, adding, “We hope that the countries involved will come to a prompt and practical solution.”
There’s something weird going on here. Any global manufacturing giant worth it’s salt should have second-source contingency plans for such lowly parts as semiconductor discretes. Even in Europe, there are other discrete manufacturers like Infineion and STMicroelctronics. Somebody (or a whole lot of somebodies) dropped the ball here.
“In just 7 minutes, thieves allegedly mounted a ladder, stole priceless jewels from the Louvre and fled on motor scooters.” No painstaking disarming of the alarm system? No sophisticated computer intrusion? No hanging from a cable to avoid triggering the floor alarm? Just smashing windows and cases with brute force? The ghosts of a century’s worth of French screenplay writers sigh in disappointment…
Welcome to Richmond, British Columbia, a suburb of Metro Vancouver.
This is a letter the city sent to residents to notify them that their home might belong to the natives who once camped there 200 years ago.
Please take note that the recent BC Supreme Court decision of Cowichan Tribes v Canada, 2025 BCSC 1490 made some very important decisions which could negatively affect the title to your property. A briefing paper prepared by City of Richmond staff is attached for your reference.
If you look at the draft map attached to the briefing, your property is located within the Claim Area outlined in green. For those whose property is in the area outlined in black, the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership – this was mandated without any prior notice to the landowners. The entire area outlined in green is claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.
Snip.
A liberal female judge issued an 863-page ruling ordering that private properties, some of which have been in families for generations, must return to the hands of a nomadic tribe that once loosely lived on the land hundreds of years ago, long before anyone who is currently alive was ever born.
This matter was so important to the judge and other liberal allies that it was the “longest trial in Canada’s history.” It is also seen as setting a precedent for confiscating property across the nation.
Now you know why the radical left keeps pushing those bullshit “land acknowledgements.”
A tenured professor at the University of Texas at Austin says he was dismissed from his senior administrative post due to “ideological differences,” marking the latest shake-up in Texas’ statewide effort to reform higher education and curb campus DEI influence.
Last week, Art Markman posted that UT leadership had dismissed him in late September as academic affairs senior vice provost.
Climate activist David Bookbinder admits its a shakedown. “Essentially, the tort liability is an indirect carbon tax. You sue an oil company, an oil company is liable, the oil company then passes that liability on to the people who are buying its products.”
NBA gambling scandal: “ESPN is reporting the arrest of Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups. Also arrested: Terry Rozier, guard for the Miami Heat.”
Billups, an NBA Hall of Famer, has been charged with partaking in an alleged illegal poker ring tied to the Bonanno, Genovese and Colombo crime families, sources told The Post.
A total of 31 people across the country are charged with running rigged games, which took place in Manhattan, the Hamptons and Las Vegas, sources said.
The players involved were being paid by mobsters to play in card games fixed with technology and card shuffling machines to give the house the advantage, sources familiar with the case said.
The athletes were told to take a dive when they had to and win when they were told. It didn’t appear as if they were attempting to pay off any debts, sources said.
Rozier is being charged with point-shaving.
Director Blue has a lot more details about the mob guys running the games, and the sophisticated technologies used, like special contact lenses to read marked cards, cryptocurrency money laundering and x-ray tables.
The Critical Drinker walks through every Disney Star Wars film, how much they cost, and how much they made or lost. Since they received substantial tax credits for filming in the UK, they evidently had to submit real numbers rather than the usual Hollywood Accounting bullshit. The Force Awakens evidently cost $638.9 million to make, which would probably rank it as the most expensive film of all time.
Trump is sentenced to nothing, Los Angeles burns, the Rotherham scandal boils, Biden flips off the nation (twice) before leaving office, Trudeau to go, and Germany starts disarming people who disagree with the government. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden will ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in more than 625 million acres of federal waters, the White House announced Monday, striking a final blow against domestic energy production just two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
The outgoing president is set to use his authority under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect offshore areas along the East Coast, West Coast, eastern Gulf of Mexico, and additional portions of the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska from future oil and gas leasing.
Snip.
The move comes on the same day that Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris is set to be certified by Congress. Trump has vowed to increase oil and gas production on a simple three-word energy policy: “Drill, baby, drill.” Biden’s latest action, however, poses an obstacle to the incoming president’s energy plans.
Asked about the ban during a Monday radio interview, Trump told host Hugh Hewitt he would “unban it immediately.”
Established 72 years ago, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act governs energy leasing activities in submerged lands under U.S. jurisdiction that extend three miles beyond the shoreline. An open-ended provision in federal law gives a president the authority to permanently withdraw portions of the Outer Continental Shelf without providing a way for a succeeding president to reverse course.
Therefore, the solution may not be as simple as Trump signing an executive order on his first day in office to undo the action. Congress would need to take legislative action. Or if Trump decides to revoke Biden’s withdrawal, that action may prompt legal challenges.
Democrats seem bound and determined to keep Americas broke for the sake of their environmental virtue signaling.
Those 34 hush money “felonies” were so serious that President Trump was sentenced to serve no jail time.
LA wildfire toll: “10 Dead, 10,000 Structures Burned In Los Angeles Area Inferno As Fire Damage Could Exceed $150 Billion.”
During the fire, hydrants ran out of water because nobody in the Democrat-dominated state could be bothered to fill the reservoir.
How badly does Los Angeles Democratic mayor Karen Bass suck? Just look at this timeline. She thought it was more important to jet off the Ghana than stay around when LA was faced with wildfire weather.
It gets better: A man apprehended setting fires with a blowtorch around LAwon’t be charged with arson. Because I guess burning people’s homes is social justice or something.
Canadian Prime Minister and all-around tool Justin Trudeau is resigning, though not until his successor is chosen in general elections. Canadian citizens enjoyed rough per-capita GDP economic parity with U.S. citizens when he took office. Now? “The gap between the Canadian and American economies has now reached its widest point in nearly a century.” And workers in Canada earn less than workers in even the poorest U.S. states. Heck of a job, Justin!
After an Elon Musk tweet brought up the Rotherham child gang rape scandal again, Keir Starmer’s Labour government went into full denial mode.
Gangs of predominantly Pakistani men have been raping and torturing vulnerable underage girls over the past three decades, with several independent inquiries having indicated systemic failures to investigate the crimes (because it would be ‘racist’). Three separate reports, published in 2013, 2014 and 2015 revealed that local politicians and police covered up the rapes.
Of note, foreigners are three times as likely to be arrested for sex offenses vs. British citizens.
In response Elon Musk launched an attack on Starmer, accusing him of failing to properly investigate and prosecute the gangs, which he called a “state-sponsored evil,” and alleging that Starmer was “complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN.”
And as The Telegraph notes, the state “had to bury the story.”
Denial about the extent of the problem is rooted deep in Britain’s political system. At times, it appears that the government’s approach to multiculturalism is not to uphold the law, but instead to minimise the risk of unrest between communities. Confronted with gangs of predominantly Pakistani men targeting predominantly white children, the state knew exactly what to do. For the good of community relations, it had to bury the story.
In Rotherham, a senior police officer told a distressed father that the town “would erupt” if the routine abuse of white children by Pakistani heritage men became public knowledge. One parent concerned about a missing daughter was told by the police that an “older Asian boyfriend” was a “fashion accessory” for girls in the town. The father of a 15-year-old rape victim was told the assault might mean she would “learn her lesson”.
Islamist MP Naz Shah just stated outright that raped girls should “shut their mouths for the good of diversity.” Just as with Democrats and illegal aliens, a little child rape is considered a small price to pay for all that glorious multiculturalism…
So, British MPs have voted against making a national inquiry into grooming gangs, in a 364-111 vote.
Man, when the “ruling class” of public servants don’t want something discussed, they really let us know about it. Big shots in England, who have no problem discussing American issues of governance, and even were fine with some of their citizens coming over the pond to campaign during our last election, are really, really annoyed that Americans are beginning to talk about the “grooming gangs” (read rapist gangs) who have operated in Rotherham and elsewhere who have been doing their thing for years, and with seeming impunity.
They’re really very annoyed about the American intrusion, you know. So much so, some are saying if the Americans don’t shut up about it, England should come cold all over its relationship with the USA.
Well, that’s gobsmacking, isn’t? It’s basically saying, “Shut up, stop talking about all the raping we did nothing to address or nip in the bud, or we won’t be your friends, anymore. We’ll take our soccer ball and go home, we will!”
I shouldn’t be so surprised. I’ve seen, and noted, in the past that for some there are two classes of sexual abuse/rape victims. The justly and properly acknowledged victims of priests, ministers, rabbi’s and religious — anything that involves church-centered abuse) and then the abused and raped people whose victimhood appears to be a lesser ken: Non-minor vulnerable adults; victims of public school teachers and staff; victims in state-run facilities. And now, apparently, English girls.
Fortunately, here in the U.S., the rule of law still actually means something. “Federal Judge Blocks Biden Administration’s Title IX Rewrite Protecting ‘Gender Identity.’”
Meta is immediately ending its DEI programs days after enacting sweeping changes to promote free speech on its platforms ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Meta vice president of human resources Janelle Gale sent an internal memo Friday announcing the company’s decision to terminate its DEI programs, Axios first reported, making it the latest large corporation to put an end to progressive workplace initiatives.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed Axios’s reporting when NR asked for comment. NR has reached out for additional comment.
“The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing,” Gale said in the memo, echoing the justifications given by other companies in walking back DEI.
“The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI,” the memo adds.
“The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”
Meta is getting rid of its DEI team and changing the role of chief diversity officer Maxine Williams. Additionally, Meta is ending its equity and inclusion programs, and its supplier diversity goals.
“We believe there are other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds,” Gale said.
Likewise, Meta is abandoning its diversity hiring approach and its corporate representation goals to prevent the impression that the company is hiring solely based on demographic characteristics.
“It’s important to us that our products are accessible to all, and are useful in promoting economic growth and opportunity around the world. We continue to be focused on serving everyone, and building a multi-talented, industry-leading workforce from all walks of life,” the memo concludes.
Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will be replacing its fact-checking program with a “community notes” style approach mimicking Elon Musk’s X. The “community notes” feature on X allows for crowdsourced fact checking and demonetizes posts that get slapped with a note for misleading information.
Zuckerberg conceded that the fact-checkers Meta partnered with following the 2016 election were too politically biased, a nod to a longstanding complaint among conservatives. Meta is also reducing its “content moderation” policies to allow for greater freedom of speech on Facebook and Threads on controversial topics such as immigration and gender ideology. On that note, Meta is bringing back its promotion of political posts and moving its content moderation teams to Texas to prevent political insulation.
Well, Austin, anyway…
In August, Zuckerberg admitted that Meta was wrong to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story and criticized the Biden administration for pressuring Facebook into suppressing certain content related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Online censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and skeptics of stringent Covid-19 policies was a priority for congressional Republicans in their investigations over the past two years.
He also went on Joe Rogan and added UFC head Dana White to Meta’s board. If Zuckerberg is a weather-vane, the MAGA winds must be very strong indeed…
Biden’s letting 11 terrorists out to fly to Oman because of course he is. All 11 are Yemanis. At least he’s not letting Khalid Sheikh Mohammad go. Yet…
Remember how in The Prisoner, one security device was a giant rolling ball? China evidently took inspiration from that, but there version is made out of metal.
Meanwhile, in Germany: “Saxony-Anhalt begins disarming AfD members. AfD members in many German states are stripped of many of their rights, including the right to privacy and lawful gun ownership.” You know, I get the feeling I’ve seen this movie before… (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
How car theft rings are stealing exotic cars by posing as legitimate car transport companies.
I don’t often cover New York sports teams or link to ESPN, but this story about how the “New York Football Giants” (to use Dwight’s preferred nomenclature) went 3-14 puts the fun in dysfunctional, including asking their starting cornerback to take a pay cut…right before a game.
We’re in the last stretch of the 2024 campaign, Joe Rogan did a great interview with J. D. Vance, all sorts of sketchy voting problems surface, IDF dirtnaps another Hamas terrorist scumbbag, Nvidia replaces Intel, and influencers prioritize selfies over survival. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Joe Rogan did a really great interview with J.D. Vance. The Trump interview was good, but Trump did his usual looping and weaving thing. Vance comes across as not only smart and confident, but seems (unlike Kamala Harris) extremely comfortable in his own skin.
A large number of suspicious voter registration applications were dropped off at the county elections office near Monday’s deadline, county officials said. An investigation by the district attorney’s office found incorrect addresses, false identification information, false names and names that did not match Social Security information.
Shenanigans: “Kentucky County Clerk Confirms Voting Booth ‘Glitch’ Shifted Trump Votes To Kamala.”
A victory. “Supreme Court Allows Virginia to Remove Noncitizens from Voter Rolls before Election.”
We’ve passed the peak of woke politics in the U.S., and the Harris for president campaign is the leading indicator.
Of all the things that Kamala Harris wants you to know about her — that she grew up in a middle-class family, that she’s not Joe Biden, that she has a “to-do list” for the American people — perhaps foremost among them is that she’s not woke.
She doesn’t have any rote line asserting this, but achieving distance from the fashionable left-wing politics that defined the Trump years and their immediate aftermath motivates much of what she says and does.
That Harris now feels compelled to disavow so many of the ideas that she once embraced is powerful testament to their political toxicity.
An idea has won or lost in American politics when both parties favor or oppose it, or simply don’t want to fight over it anymore. Ronald Regan’s economics truly prevailed when the Democratic Party, via Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, accepted his basic approach. Gay marriage won politically when Republicans decided to stop talking about the issue.
By this standard, woke attitudes and policies are in marked decline, and Kamala Harris is Exhibit A.
Except for her abortion radicalism, she’s turned her back on much of what she once professed to believe or sympathize with.
Defund the police? Absolutely not.
Abolish ICE? No way.
DEI? Haven’t heard of it.
Medicare for all? That was a long time ago.
The Green New Deal? Let’s not get carried away.
She has backed off her extravagant positions on the trans issue and the border. She now insists that rather than pushing the envelope on either, she simply wants to follow the law. You could be forgiven for thinking the only pronouns she knows are she/her and he/him.
Harris doesn’t bring up identity politics at all. Not only does she not talk about the once-ubiquitous concepts of white privilege or “equity,” she doesn’t even talk about breaking the glass ceiling or the history-making nature of her candidacy. Listening to her campaign, you’d have no idea that the twin -isms, racism and sexism, have been consuming obsessions of the Left for years now.
But if she gets elected, just like Obama, she’ll abandon all of her moderate positions and rush back to her radical roots.
Former President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday, Trump said the new efficiency commission would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make recommendations for “drastic reforms.”
I hope Musk gets out a big axe and that the Trump Administration actually balances the budget. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
The Green New Scam is dying. Color me skeptical as long as there’s graft to rake off…
Who watches the watchmen? “Eagle Pass Detective Sentenced to 10 Years for Hiding Illegal Aliens in Rental Properties. Hazel Eileen Diaz ran stash houses for a human smuggling organization.”
The IDF eliminated Hamas’s National Relations head Izz al-Din Kassab on Friday in Khan Yunis, Gaza, who was also one of the last remaining members of the terrorist organization’s political bureau still inside the Palestinian enclave.
The strike that killed Kassab was completed based on IDF and ISA intelligence. His assistant Ayman Ayesh was also killed in the strike.
He was also responsible for Hamas’s relations and cooperation, whether strategic or military, with other terrorist organizations within the Gaza Strip such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The rise and fall of China’s “mistress villages.” Bonus: The Hong Kong businessmen who used to keep mistresses in Shinjin are now evidently buying houses for a new generation of them in the Rowland Heights area of Los Angeles…
Rapper and big money Cook County Democratic Party donator Lil Durk, AKA Durk Devontay Banks, has been arrested in a murder-for-hire scheme against a fellow rapper. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Records show the investment arm of two major Texas universities bought shares in more than 50 Chinese companies.
On September 23, the American Accountability Foundation exposed how the University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company’s asset managers advanced leftist ideology through their shareholder resolutions.
On October 17, UTIMCO President and CEO Richard Hall told state senators that he was “not happy with those votes” and the firm “would do better.”
However, a deeper dive into the records AAF acquired also revealed concerning investments. According to records, UTIMCO has invested money in Chinese companies.
UTIMCO allocated some of its assets to the following entities: Connor, Clark & Lunn Investment Management, JP Morgan Asset Management, and Acadian Asset Management. The three asset managers participated in shareholder votes in China-based companies, revealing the UTIMCO investments in these businesses.
In October 2023, Connor, Clark & Lunn participated in a shareholder vote for Topsec Technologies Group, a China-based cyber security company. Reuters reported that Topsec provides “network security products, big data products, and cloud services to customers in various industries such as government, finance, operators, energy, health, education, transportation, and manufacturing.”
There were shareholder votes for Huaneng Power International, Inc., a power company that boasts of being “one of the largest listed power producers” in China. Their parent company is China Huaneng Group Co., Ltd., which owns more than 50 percent of HPI shares. According to their website, the company is “a key state-owned company established with the approval of the [China] State Council.”
In December 2023, the management company Connor, Clark & Lunn Investment Management voted 19 times for electing various individuals as directors or supervisors of the Chinese company.
Snip.
AAF records showed other investments into China by UTIMCO fund managers, including BOE Technology Group Co., Ltd., Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd., Opple Lighting Co., Ltd., and LONGi Green Energy Technology Co., Ltd.
A million-dollar cheating ring resulted in at least 210 unqualified teachers, including two sexual predators, receiving teacher certifications. The ring was exposed this week after the Harris County District Attorney’s Office filed charges against five individuals involved.
The alleged ringleader is Vincent Grayson, the head boys basketball coach at Houston’s Booker T. Washington High School.
Also charged are Tywana Gilford Mason, the teacher certification test proctor; Nicholas Newton, an assistant principal who served as the proxy test-taker; Darian Nikole Wilhite, another proctor; and LaShonda Roberts, an assistant principal at Yates High School who helped recruit would-be teachers.
All are charged with two counts of engaging in organized criminal activity.
Allegedly, candidates seeking certification would pay Grayson $2,500. He would then give a 20 percent portion to Gilford Mason, who would then allow Newton to sit for the test under the teacher’s name. The candidates would be given a testing time and location by Gilford Mason, then show up, sign in, and leave. Newton would then arrive and take the test for them.
And now the unqualified teachers who got in on this scheme are out there teaching children…
Sony shuts down studio that released disastrous $400 million woke shooter Concord.
Big news for your portfolio: “Nvidia To Replace Intel In The Dow Jones Industrial Average.” Nvidia has certainly been on a tear as of late, but if Intel hadn’t screwed up their sub 10nm process, this wouldn’t be happening.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh. “These influencers refused to wear life jackets on a yacht because it would ruin their selfies. They drowned when their boat sank.”
Harris plagiarizes Wikipedia and blows off Catholics, Gwen Walz assigns America homework, social justice groomers keep trying to trans your kids, Williamson County’s sheriff gets accused of pay-for-play corruption, another Hamas leader eats a last meal of kosher drone, Columbia U wants to silence a pro-Israel professor, and a meat recall expands to my local supermarket.
The Biden-Harris administration announced [last] Friday that it was filing a lawsuit against the state of Virginia for enforcing voter integrity laws in the state that aim to curb illegal voting in elections.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who has a history of espousing racist views, claimed without evidence that Virginia’s move to increase election integrity was an “eleventh hour effort” intended, in part, to “disenfranchise qualified voters.”
The DOJ claimed that it was doing so because it was “too close to the Nov. 5 general election” to remove voters:
Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
However, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order requiring that non-citizens be removed from voter rolls was signed on August 7, 2024 — exactly 90 days before Election Day.
The problem is the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are not, in fact, voters because they are not citizens, said Youngkin.
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said.
Youngkin said that the lawsuit was a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.”
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.
While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences.
Nothing says “commitment to rigorous academic scholarship” quite like not just quoting verbatim from Wikipedia, but doing so incompetently.
Host of Fox News “Special Report” Bret Baier finally snagged that interview with Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris. Harris was campaigning in Washington Crossing, PA and was proud of the former Republicans and Trump administration people who took the stage with her and happy with their endorsement, delighted in their support of her as a presidential candidate.
The entire interview was a train wreck, but there were particular moments that were exceptionally cringeworthy, damaging, and proved with glaring certainty why she is unfit to lead.
Baier started off with the topic of illegal immigration, and you could visibly see Harris deflate like a balloon before the first question was asked.
Immediately Harris tried to filibuster Baier and do this interview’s version of “I’m speaking.” Harris brought up the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which she claimed addressed the flaws in the asylum system with more judges, 15 million more border agents, increased penalties, stemming the flow of fentanyl, shore up entry points, and how she has worked toward bipartisan efforts to strengthen the border.
Baier gently pushed back with documented facts, and Harris briefly got that deer in headlights look she gets when she is desperately trying to find her talking points. Then she jumped on her supposed record as California Attorney General (not her current position as VP) as proof that she knew how to handle this crisis. Failing to understand that the fact that a crisis exists is proof that you have no ability to correct it.
But the most purely evil and damning part of this topic of illegal immigration was the fact that Harris could not even form the words to apologize for allowing criminals into the country that resulted in the senseless deaths of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin.
Former president Donald Trump poked fun at vice president Kamala Harris during the Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, criticizing his political rival for failing to show up at the charity event in person.
Harris addressed the crowd at the white-tie event, which raises funds for Catholics charities, in a pre-recorded video – a highly unusual move for a presidential candidate. It has become a tradition for presidential candidates to speak at the event since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960.
The vice president is the first presidential contender to skip out on the dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984.
There’s an auspicious precedent.
“I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” Trump said.
He went on to joke that Harris must be “out receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” a reference to a viral video from earlier this month of the Michigan governor feeding a chip to a leftist influencer on her knees.
Trump accused the vice president of being “disrespectful to Catholics.”
He also quipped about the Democratic nominee’s odd’s of winning the election, saying, “There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris but I’m not worried about them. Their wives and their wives’ lovers are voting for me.”
Does Kamala Harris need a mea culpa in PA? Or does her disconnect from voters in the Rust Belt go beyond state lines and religion?
That question has rolled around in my head since reading William McGurn’s column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. McGurn uses Gretchen Whitmer’s bizarre mockery of the Catholic Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat to argue that the Democrat anointee for the presidency now has a Whitmer-created problem. But is that entirely true, or does it go beyond Whitmer’s blasphemy?
McGurn recognizes a broader problem, but perhaps not its scope. First, he outlines the direct issues with Catholics, who comprise 30% of Pennsylvania:
As California’s attorney general, Ms. Harris signed several friend-of-the-court briefs opposing religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby and religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She said she was “proud” to have co-sponsored California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices about where women could get an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2018 rejected the law as a likely violation of the First Amendment.
But perhaps Ms. Harris’s most notorious Catholic moment came after she was elected senator. When Brian Buescher was nominated for a federal judgeship, she grilled him about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization. Although President John F. Kennedy was also a Knight, Ms. Harris treated the group as though it were the Ku Klux Klan.
She would later co-sponsor the Equality Act, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops said could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortions they oppose. Last month she snubbed New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan by declining to attend this Thursday’s Al Smith dinner, an election-year staple that has brought Democratic and Republican candidates together in a civil setting for decades.
Those are the direct issues, and those aren’t limited to Pennsylvania. Overall, Republicans now have a statistically significant edge in party ID among Catholics, according to Pew polling this year, 50/44. Nationally, Catholics accounted for 25% of the vote in 2020, although apparently pollsters didn’t include data on religion in state-level exit polling. One can expect a similarly significant number of Catholics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps slightly lower levels in states like Arizona and Georgia. In every state, however, Catholics make up a far larger part of the electorate than the Arab-Americans did in Michigan, and yet both Biden and Harris obsessed over their support all year long.
That’s one problem, but that’s not the only problem. A more recent Pew poll shows Harris trailing Donald Trump with Catholics by five points, even worse than Hillary Clinton performed in 2016. But the issue isn’t entirely religious:
Mr. Biden may be the last of the big-time Democrats whose base was the white working class. But it confers a sensibility Ms. Harris is conspicuously lacking. …
Politico reports that Ms. Harris’s prospects are “considerably dicier” because of a “cultural dissonance” between her progressive San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians.
That gets closer to the real danger for Democrats, but it has less to do with “white” and “Catholic” than it does to working class. Biden had a political and cultural connection to working-class voters, not just because of his Catholicism but because of his background. He fit into that milieu even if that mainly came as a conceit, especially after fifty years in Washington DC, but he could talk in their language too … at least before his brain turned to jelly. People keep overlooking his 2012 address to the Democrat convention, which turned out to be the best of the week, in which he artfully bridged the gap between the working class and the Academia-drenched elite that had mainly taken over the party in the current generation.
Harris simply can’t do that. Not only is she incapable of connecting at anywhere near that level, she only recently even showed a desire to do so. Her lame attempt at repeating the mantra “I was raised in a middle-class household” ad nauseam is about as close as she gets. Culturally, she comes from the Academia-drenched elite and speaks their language, to the extent she speaks any political language effectively at all. Harris tosses around clichés as a means to connect to working class voters, which initially appeared to appeal to them but have turned into a major liability now.
The Democratic Party’s naked contempt for both religious believers and the actual working class has been evident for a long, long time.
More on the subject: “Blowing Off the Al Smith Dinner Might Have Cost Harris Pennsylvania — and the Election.”
The Catholic vote is not as monolithic as it used to be. In 1928, the Catholic vote was overwhelmingly Democratic, concentrated in urban centers. By 1960, the Catholic vote was fracturing through intermarriage and economic issues, but Kennedy still received about 65% of the vote from his co-religionists.
Today, Donald Trump can expect to get about 60% of the Catholic vote. In Pennsylvania, The Catholic vote might be pivotal in a state that Harris absolutely, positively has to win.
“Her San Francisco progressive persona isn’t a good fit for Joe Biden’s native state,” William McGurn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday.
Snip. “In an election in Pennsylvania that will almost certainly be decided by less than 100,000 votes, Harris skipping the Al Smith Dinner was not only stupid but might be the mistake that cost her the White House.” Eh, probably not. Harris will probably lose the election because she’s part of an administration had presided over a wretched economy and let in millions of illegal aliens. Plus she’s a horrible candidate that literally nobody voted for. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Google is up to its old tricks, “hiding Conservative news on election 23 pages deep.””When using the search term “donald trump presidential race 2024,” researchers had to scroll through 23 pages of results before they come to a U.S.-based right-leaning news source, a single Fox News video six results down on the 23rd page.”
An excerpt from the book Walz' wife was reading to children shows them all riding the gay dad while he puts a vacuum cleaner up to his mouth. I'm sure it's nothing. From: Bathe the Cat. pic.twitter.com/2npr5s6mDN
Gwen Walz also seems to feel that the best way to get men to the polls is assigning them homework.
Can you put some really money behind that and put it on air? Maybe during college football?
There are still men out there who don’t hate this campaign with every fiber of their being, and I think this ad could be enough to nag them right into Trump’s arms. https://t.co/vk6jwJY9oM
Yes, social justice warrior teachers do want to trans your kids. “Court Shuts Down BLM Teacher Trying To Force Trans Ideologies On Kids.”
Megan Williams is a first-grade teacher who forced her 6 and 7-year-old students to “observe” so-called Transgender Awareness Day. This Black Lives Matter activist subjected these small children to non-curricular propaganda about “gender identity” and sex changes.
Williams disturbingly went so far as to tell these kids that their “parents ma[d]e a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl” and may have been wrong. Parents complained, but Williams was backed by her school principal and superintendent.
Three mothers fired back by filing a lawsuit against Williams, the school, the district, and district officials in June of 2022. Their goal was to obtain a moratorium “on gender dysphoria and transgender transitioning,” parental notice and opt-out rights on the topic absent such a prohibition, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Thankfully, Judge Joy Conti of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania just ruled largely in favor of these mothers.
Judge Conti stated that “parents have a constitutional right to reasonable and realistic advance notice and the ability to opt their elementary-age children of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics and to not have requirements for notice and opting out of those topics that are more stringent than those for other sensitive topics.”
Here’s the remarks in the aired clip shared by Johnson:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%…The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
And here — I’ll put it in bold — is what CBS edited out for the broadcast:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%, and when I was there on the ground, and you should go, I mean, bring the cameras and talk to the people there, they’ll tell you, don’t- don’t take politicians words for this or the administration’s word, talk to the people there on the ground they had not been provided the resources almost two weeks out from the storm that they desperately needed. And when I was there 13 days, post- you know, post the storm hitting that state, people are still being rescued. They’re stuck in the higher elevations in the mountains because the roads are down and all the rest. So they need every- every available resource and all hands on deck. The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
Issues in the debate ranged from abortion to the border crisis, and allowing boys in girls’ sports.
On abortion, Cruz said he supported Texas’ pro-life laws while acknowledging that other states would make different decisions.
“In Texas, we overwhelmingly support that parents should be notified and have to consent before their child gets an abortion. In Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that late-term abortions in the eighth and ninth months, that’s too extreme. And I’ll tell you, in Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that taxpayer money shouldn’t pay for abortions,” said Cruz.
He went on to attack his opponent’s position on abortion as extreme, noting that Allred “voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental notification law. He voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental consent law. He voted to legalize late-term abortions, including the eighth and ninth months.”
Allred, meanwhile, said he would fight to “restore a woman’s right to choose” and to “make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again.”
Snip.
One of the biggest issues playing out in the campaign thus far has been Allred’s position on allowing boys in girls’ sports. The issue has been the target of Cruz’s campaign ads and led to Allred denying the accusations, despite voting against legislation to protect girls sports.
“I know a lot of y’all at home, for example, saw two biological men competing in women’s boxing at the Olympics,” said Cruz. “That was wildly unfair. You know, my youngest daughter plays volleyball. It’s not fair for a biological boy or man, a teenage boy, to spike the volleyball at her, and he has voted repeatedly in favor of that.”
FEMA’s entanglement with the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open southern border policies by diverting storm relief funds ($1.4 billion, according to NYPost) for illegal and legal aliens may have undermined the federal agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies, such as the Katrina-like disaster unfolding in the US Southeast.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dropped the bombshell [two weeks ago]: FEMA “does not have the funds” to see Americans through the rest of this Atlantic hurricane season. The federal agency drained the funds by prioritizing taxpayer funds for illegal and legal aliens versus US citizens as the Biden-Harris globalist team rolled out the red carpet to anyone, even terrorists, via the open southern borders.
Connect the dots, if you can,” Tim Murtaugh, an adviser to former President Trump’s campaign, wrote on X, adding, “DHS says FEMA might not have enough cash to help people through hurricane season. But in 2 years of a new Biden-Harris program, they’ve spent $1 BILLION on housing and other services for migrants.”
Shedding a whole heck of a lot of color on the situation, Savanah Hernandez, a reporter for Turning Point USA, wrote on X that she has uncovered some of the “first looks” inside fully furnished luxury apartments for migrants that received free rent and utilities for two years.
Hernandez wrote in a note on The Post Millennial:
The Brunswick Landing apartments in Maine sparked controversy earlier this year when it was discovered that homeless migrants in the area were getting the opportunity to live in the units rent-free for up to two years. Migrants living in the apartments shared that not only is the rent-free, the utilities are paid and we got an inside look at the furnished apartments that would run the average American about $2,300 dollars.
“FEMA: Disaster Relief No Longer About Emergency Response, It’s About ‘Disaster Equity.'”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposed to be the government’s premier emergency relief organization in times of disaster, like the situation now faced by victims of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath in North Carolina and Tennessee.
But according to the FEMA website, the agency now places higher priority on instituting Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity guidelines than on easing the suffering of Americans displaced by disaster.
Among the goals listed in FEMA’s strategic plan are to:
Instill equity as a foundation for emergency management
Lead whole of community in climate resilience
Promote and sustain a ready FEMA & prepared nation
What does that look like in action?
Here’s an example of a FEMA disaster preparedness meeting where participants discuss how LGBTQIA individuals were suffering disproportionally before the storm compared to other disaster victims.
Notice how the focus shifts from doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people to ensuring that they are promoting “equity in disaster relief.”
Social justice is racist poison that ruins everything, and now it’s costing Americans their lives.
Here we go again. “Report: Migrant Caravans Leaving Southern Mexico Headed Toward US Border.”
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has declared a “blood feud” against three federal lawmakers from neighboring North Caucasus republics in his first comments on last month’s deadly shooting outside the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries.
Kadyrov has vowed to help Vladislav Bakalchuk, the estranged husband of Wildberries CEO Tatiana Kim — Russia’s wealthiest woman — to return his wife and block the merger of their e-commerce giant with the smaller outdoor advertising group Russ.
The family and business dispute escalated last month when Bakalchuk led a group of men to Wildberries’ Moscow offices and allegedly tried to force their way into the building. Two security guards, who were ethnic Ingush, were killed in the shootout and multiple felony charges, including murder, were filed against Bakalchuk and several other ethnic Chechens involved in the incident.
Kadyrov is a piece of work, but one with a sufficiently strong independent power base that Putin has felt compelled to buy him off. Kadyrov declaring a blood fued against Russian officials probably isn’t a sign of harmony in Russia’s government…
Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.
A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.
The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.
The Israelis did not choose the way this war began, but they will be the authors of its conclusion. And the end is near. The Israelis have brought the Gaza Strip closer to its day of liberation from the tyranny of an illegitimate terrorist regime than all the combined efforts of the peace processors in the global diplomatic corps ever achieved. It is a shame that the American administration that stood so stalwartly with Israel at the outset of this campaign willingly sacrificed its ability to celebrate alongside its Israeli counterparts. This should be America’s victory, too. But by spending months on end agonizing over how Israel was achieving its honorable objective, the Biden White House and its allies lost sight of our shared strategic goals.
We hit the Houthis with B-2s. I didn’t have that on my 2024 dance card…
“Williamson County’s Democrat Sheriff Accused of Accepting Pay-to Play Donation. On September 24, the Williamson County Commissioners Court issued a contract for over $500,000 to Family Hospital Management Company for ‘Jail Inmate Psychological Services’. Just four days before a county contract was issued, [Democrat Sheriff Mike] Gleason received a $20,000 campaign donation from the founder and CEO of the company that received the contract.” “Jail Inmate Psychological Services” sounds like a great avenue for leftwing graft…
“A North Carolina Democratic county leader, who is also running for a seat in the state House, was arrested after allegedly stealing Trump signs near a road last week. Moore County, North Carolina, County Chair Lowell Simon, 68, was charged with two counts of misdemeanor larceny of political signs after he admitted to removing Trump signs and keeping them in his car.”
“The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian says she ‘woke up’ after being molested by LA homeless man and ‘the good people’ slammed her for talking about it. Kasparian described feeling “politically homeless” and shared how the backlash she received from liberals after the assault played a key role in her reevaluation.” Seems like social justice warriors feel that being molested by a homeless man or raped by an illegal alien is a small price to pay for taxpayer-subsidized abortion…
Boy dressed as girl assaults actual girl, gives her a concussion and blurred vision. You know what the school administrators did, don’t you? That’s right, they suspended the victim.
“Edgewood ISD Superintendent Gets Raise While Students Are Failing. Edgewood ISD extended Superintendent Eduardo Hernández’s contract until 2029 and raised his annual salary to $291,923.””Only 23 percent of Edgewood ISD students can read, write, and do math at or above grade level.” Edgewood is on the west side of San Antonio.
Columbia U is trying to make their campus Judenfrei.
Columbia University is temporarily suspending a prominent pro-Israel business professor’s access to campus after he publicly criticized school officials for permitting anti-Israel campus demonstrations on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Columbia notified Israeli-American business professor Shai Davidai on Tuesday that he will be banned from campus for violating university policy on harassing school employees.
On Tuesday night, Davidai posted a video on social media accusing Columbia of retaliating against him for posting a video of himself asking Columbia’s chief operating officer Cas Halloway why he allowed pro-Hamas demonstrators to protest on the anniversary of October 7.
“Right now I was supposed to be at the school of social work at Columbia, where the Jewish students are holding their own memorial service for the senseless violence of October 7th. But then I got a call from my lawyer, who says the university has decided to not allow me to be on campus anymore,” Davidai said.
“Why? Because of October 7th. Because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob. And because I was not afraid to expose Mr. f**king Cas Holloway for not doing anything about it.”
Davidai should sue them over equal rights violation for millions. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated toolsets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the Internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.
One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different toolset created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.
The practice of air gapping is typically reserved for the most sensitive networks or devices connected to them, such as those used in systems for voting, industrial control, manufacturing, and power generation. A host of malware used in espionage hacking over the past 15 years (for instance, here and here) demonstrate that air gapping isn’t a foolproof protection. It nonetheless forces threat groups to expend significant resources that are likely obtainable only by nation-states with superior technical acumen and unlimited budgets. ESET’s discovery puts GoldenJackal in a highly exclusive collection of threat groups.
Then there’s this: “The basic flow of the attack is, first, infecting an Internet-connected device through a means ESET and Kaspersky have been unable to determine.” There’s a 99% chance that these air-gaped systems are being attacked through the usual human engineering or security lapse vectors. Which leaves a 1% chance of some form of electromagnetic witchcraft…
“WeightWatchers Squeezes Higher After Unveiling New Low-Cost GLP-1 Treatment…WW announced the addition of a new compounded semaglutide to its lineup to beat America’s obesity crisis sparked by the processed foods industrial complex. The new treatment starts at $129 per month, and each additional month will cost $189. This is significantly less than GLP-1 obesity treatments from big pharma, which cost north of $1,000 a month.”
Fiat/Stellantis merged with Chrysler in 2014, and now they’re threatening to shut it down in two years.
BrucePac listeria meat recall expands, now includes some HEB items.
Disney plans to slash budgets on Marvel movies going forward. On the one hand, that’s probably prudent, since it gets harder and harder to turn a profit with soaring budgets. On the other hand, Marvel’s recent problems aren’t a product of big budgets, they’re a product of wokeness and crappy scripts.
Rick Beato has an interesting video with R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills. I didn’t realize that the other three members wrote the music then handed it off to Michael Stipe, who would go off and create the lyrics by himself.
It’s been a week of petty frustrations, with simple things like paying for online transactions made impossible by websites that send out the wrong information despite the right information being on file. Speaking of frustration, Americans continue to be battered by high inflation, blacks continue to abandon Biden, and it turns out that the Pope might, just might, be Catholic after all.
A hotter-than-expected consumer price index report rattled Wall Street Wednesday, but markets are buzzing about an even more specific prices gauge contained within the data — the so-called supercore inflation reading.
Along with the overall inflation measure, economists also look at the core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to find the true trend. The supercore gauge, which also excludes shelter and rent costs from its services reading, takes it even a step further. Fed officials say it is useful in the current climate as they see elevated housing inflation as a temporary problem and not as good a measure of underlying prices.
Supercore accelerated to a 4.8% pace year over year in March, the highest in 11 months.
Tom Fitzpatrick, managing director of global market insights at R.J. O’Brien & Associates, said if you take the readings of the last three months and annualize them, you’re looking at a supercore inflation rate of more than 8%, far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.
According to a Wall Street Journal Swing State Poll, blacks, especially black males are abandoning Biden in huge numbers.
While most Black men said they intend to support Biden, some 30% of them in the poll said they were either definitely or probably going to vote for the former Republican president. There isn’t comparable WSJ swing-state polling from 2020, but Trump received votes from 12% of Black men nationwide that year, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate.
That’s an 18 percentage point swing, minimum, for black males, if the national results and the swing state voting is similar.
By confirmed, I mean those who said they intended to vote for Trump.
The gap is even larger if we factor in undecided voters. Biden is down by a massive 30 percentage points vs 2020.
Good: A teacher helping her son with homework. Bad: A teacher helping her son force female students into sex trafficking. “Klein Cain High School cosmetology teacher Kedria McMath Grigsby is accused of helping her son, Roger Magee, force the troubled teens into prostitution.”
Investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.
As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has announced his interim charges for the Senate, a set of 57 issues he is calling on Senate Committees to investigate and research ahead of the legislative session next year.
The list of charges runs the gamut of issues conservatives have called on the legislature to address, including property tax relief, protecting Texas land from hostile foreign ownership, and strengthening laws preventing electioneering by school districts and other political subdivisions.
Some of the biggest reform proposals, however, have been reserved for higher education.
Patrick has asked the Higher Education Subcommittee to study and make recommendations regarding the role of ‘faculty senates’, antisemitism on college campuses, as well as to review the implementation of a new state law banning DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in state universities that went into effect earlier this year.
“The Senate’s work to study the list of charges will begin in the coming weeks and months. Following completion of hearings, committees will submit reports with their specific findings and policy recommendations before December 1, 2024,” said Patrick.
When you think Houston Democratic Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee has already said the stupidest thing she possibly can, she goes out and proves you wrong.
Thanks to New York City’s idiotic rent control laws, not only would a hotel guest refuse to pay rent or leave, but a court actually ruled that he was the owner of the hotel.
First class stamps are going up to 73 cents. Thanks, Joe Biden.
If the commies running Vietnam accuse someone of a crime, I don’t automatically trust them, but Truong My Lan may actually be guilty.
Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.
It’s a rare verdict – she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan’s husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.
Snip.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.
I've been waiting 29 years to tell this story about OJ and his days at USC. Now that he's dead (may he burn in hell) I have a story that I signed an NDA for that is no longer valid. I was a junior at USC working in Topping Student Center on campus in 1995. I was an administrative…
Chris Copson of The Tank Museum has an in-depth look at the RPG-7 and its history as an effective hand-held tank-killing weapon and poor man’s artillery.
Some highlights:
How a HEAT RPG charge works: “There is a trumpet-shaped liner in this section inside an aerodynamic fairing. And behind that is a copper cone, and underneath that is the RDX explosive charge. When that detonates, it fires what’s effectively an enormously powerful bolt of kinetic energy forward. That’s what’s called the Munroe effect, and it will penetrate up to 260mm of rolled homogeneous armor.”
The Russians were thought to have lost over 100 tanks in Grozny during the first Chechan War.
Seven of eight U.S. helicopters brought down in Afghanistan were from RPG fire.
Four Black Hawk helicopters taken down in Mogadishu were taken down by RPG fire.
Methods evolved to combat RPGs include explosive reactive armor, improvised outer armor, and slat armor.
“Can an RPG 7 round penetrate the composite frontal armor of the modern main battle tank? No, it can’t. But it was never intended to.” But the more modern RPG-29 can.
Here’s a snippet on the Russo-Ukrainian War from an interview Joe Rogan did with former CIA officer Mike Baker last week.
Some takeaways:
Putin has been “pretty damn consistent over the years.”
If you look at what he did in Chechnya, if you look at what he did helping Assad in Syria, if you look at what he did annexing Crimea, if you look at Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia. Every step of the way he’s been following in his mind this stated desire, that he’s made very public over the years, to rebuild his sphere of influence.
We were too optimistic, thinking that he was thinking like we do in a rational process.
Intelligence on what Putin actually wants is hard because his inner circle keeps getting smaller and smaller.
Human intelligence is hard, and despite movies, blackmail or a honeytrap are rarely the most effective methods.
Putin was a KGB officer for 15 years, and he served in East Germany rather than the west. “He doesn’t really understand how we think.”
The collapse of communism 1989-1991 was a great opportunity for recruiting spies behind the iron curtain.
Putin thinks “You guys have disrespected me, fuck you all. I told you I want my spirit a sphere of influence, and I don’t care whether I have to break it.”
“He called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, and he’s he’s serious about that, he means that.”
He’s cut loose some of his own inner circle over the past couple of weeks.
“Was he given bad intel? Or was he given intel and choose to ignore it?” Like many dictators, Putin has a “thermocline of truth” (though Baker doesn’t use that phrase) between him and any possible bad news.
“They were gonna get in there, maybe within 48 hours, they were going to have control of Kiev, they would be welcomed by the population in Ukraine, and they would be able to establish a puppet regime.”
At this point, there seems to be no indication that Russian forces are measurably closer to their goal of controlling all of Ukraine.
Here’s a LiveMap snapshot.
From a pure strategic viewpoint, those Russian tendrils snaking toward Kiev from the northeast look like a bad idea, since there’s no way to protect their supply lines.
(Always remember that the map is not the territory, and that both sides are working hard to put out propaganda, though the Russians seem to be manifestly incompetent at it.)
Here’s a fascinating thread reportedly leaked from an active Russian FSB (successor to the KGB) analyst about how badly everything is screwed up.
Kadyrov's squad was absolutely demolished before they even had a chance to fight and they got blown to pieces. I do not have any info that it was an FSB leak to Ukraine, so I’d give it a 1-2% chance – but can’t exclude this possibility completely.
I assume that’s Ramzan Kadyrov, corrupt head of the Chechen Republic, former resistance fighter against Russia who defected in 1999 and was appointed by Putin in 2007. Bit of a jihadist scumbag to boot, and just a generally nasty piece of work. I assume by “Kadyrov’s squad” they mean the Kadyrovtsy, the militia forces under his direct control.
Our Blitzkrieg has totally collapsed. It is impossible to complete the task: If Zelensky and his deputies were captured in the first 3 days, all key buildings also captured, and they were forced to read an address of their surrender to the country,
Some tweets about who could they even get post-Zelensky to sign a treaty (Medvechuk? Tsaryova? Yanukovich?) snipped.
2) Our logistics are already over-extended today. We can send a much large contingent into Ukraine, and what would we get? Ukraine – a territorially enormous country, and their hate towards us is astronomical.
With regards to Russian military losses: I don’t know the reality – no one does. There was some information the first 2 days, but now no one knows what is happening in Ukraine. We’ve lost contact with major divisions. (!!)
Because all of this was planned at the top (in Russia), because we were told that such a scenario will not happen (Ukraine invasion) except only if we were to be attacked first.
Now, civilian losses in Ukraine will follow a geometric pattern progression, and resistance against us will only get stronger. Infantries already tried to enter cities – out of 20 paratrooper groups, only one had “provisional” success.
And so, with the Ukrainian question we lunged as if going for a 100m sprint, but turned out we’d signed up for a marathon. And this is a rather brief overview of the current events.
Cheap Chinese tires have been blamed for a Russian convoy of armoured vehicles being unable to reach Kyiv.
Yesterday, the Ministry of Defence issued an update revealing that a convoy of Russian tanks advancing on the capital of Ukraine remained 30km from the centre of the city having made little progress over the previous three days because of “Ukranian resistance, mechanical breakdown and congestion.”
Karl Muth, an academic based at the University of Chicago and a self-described tire expert, took to Twitter to set out a theory blaming cheap Chinese tires for the slow advance of Russian vehicles.
“Those aren’t Soviet-era heavy truck radials,” Muth said, commenting on a photo of a Russian army vehicle with ripped tires.
Instead Muth believes the trucks use “Chinese military tires, and I believe specifically the Yellow Sea YS20.”
“This is a tire I first encountered in Somalia and Sudan. it’s a bad Chinese copy of the excellent Michelin XZL military tire design,” he continued.
Former pentagon staff member Trent Telenko also got stuck into the debate and said “poor Russian army truck maintenance practices” has created a risk of equipment failure.
“When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end. The side walls get rotted/brittle such that using low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail catastrophically via rips,” Telenko said.
Morgan Stanley analyst says that Russia is heading toward debt default as soon as April 15. Those are dollar-denominated bonds, which means they can’t be paid with devalued rubles.
There are reportedly more than 400,000 “volunteer hackers” helping Ukraine fight its cyberwar against Russia.
Victor Zhora, deputy chief of Ukraine’s information protection service, told Bloomberg last week that Ukraine was putting up a “cyber resistance” against its invasion that would work to try and weaken Russia.
Zhora said: “Our friends, Ukrainians all over globe, [are] united to defend our country in cyberspace. [Ukraine is working to do] everything possible to protect our land in cyberspace, our networks, and to make the aggressor feel uncomfortable with their actions.”
He also said that volunteers were helping Ukraine obtain intelligence in order to fight back at Russian military systems.
They are also trying to get the message out to Russian citizens, who have been Fed a starkly different narrative from their government than the rest of the world has seen play out. Volunteers are working to “address Russian people directly by phone calls, by emails, by messages” and “by putting texts on their services and showing real pictures of war.”
There aren’t 400,000 real hackers around the world. But 10,000 hackers and 390,000 script kiddies can sill do a lot of damage…
More than a week into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Air Force has yet to commence large-scale operations. Inactivity in the first few days could be ascribed to various factors, but the continued absence of major air operations now raises serious capability questions.
One of the greatest surprises from the initial phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the inability of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) fighter and fighter-bomber fleets to establish air superiority, or to deploy significant combat power in support of the under-performing Russian ground forces. On the first day of the invasion, an anticipated series of large-scale Russian air operations in the aftermath of initial cruise- and ballistic-missile strikes did not materialise. An initial analysis of the possible reasons for this identified potential Russian difficulties with deconfliction between ground-based surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, a lack of precision-guided munitions and limited numbers of pilots with the requisite expertise to conduct precise strikes in support of initial ground operations due to low average VKS flying hours. These factors all remain relevant, but are no longer sufficient in themselves to explain the anaemic VKS activity as the ground invasion continues into its second week. Russian fast jets have conducted only limited sorties in Ukrainian airspace, in singles or pairs, always at low altitudes and mostly at night to minimise losses from Ukrainian man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) and ground fire.
Snip.
While the early VKS failure to establish air superiority could be explained by lack of early warning, coordination capacity and sufficient planning time, the continued pattern of activity suggests a more significant conclusion: that the VKS lacks the institutional capacity to plan, brief and fly complex air operations at scale. There is significant circumstantial evidence to support this, admittedly tentative, explanation.
First, while the VKS has gained significant combat experience in complex air environments over Syria since 2015, it has only operated aircraft in small formations during those operations. Single aircraft, pairs or occasionally four-ships have been the norm. When different types of aircraft have been seen operating together, they have generally only comprised two pairs at most. Aside from prestige events such as Victory Day parade flypasts, the VKS also conducts the vast majority of its training flights in singles or pairs. This means that its operational commanders have very little practical experience of how to plan, brief and coordinate complex air operations involving tens or hundreds of assets in a high-threat air environment. This is a factor that many Western airpower specialists and practitioners often overlook due to the ubiquity of complex air operations – run through combined air operations centres – to Western military operations over Iraq, the Balkans, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria over the past 20 years.
Second, most VKS pilots get around 100 hours’ (and in many cases less) flying time per year – around half of that flown by most NATO air forces. They also lack comparable modern simulator facilities to train and practise advanced tactics in complex environments. The live flying hours which Russian fighter pilots do get are also significantly less valuable in preparing pilots for complex air operations than those flown by NATO forces. In Western air forces such as the RAF and US Air Force, pilots are rigorously trained to fly complex sorties in appalling weather, at low level and against live and simulated ground and aerial threats. To pass advanced fast jet training they must be able to reliably do this and still hit targets within five to ten seconds of the planned time-on-target. This is a vital skill for frontline missions to allow multiple elements of a complex strike package to sequence their manoeuvres and attacks safely and effectively, even when under fire and in poor visibility. It also takes a long time to train for and regular live flying and simulator time to stay current at. By contrast, most VKS frontline training sorties involve comparatively sterile environments, and simple tasks such as navigation flights, unguided weapon deliveries at open ranges, and target simulation flying in cooperation with the ground-based air-defence system. Russia lacks access to a training and exercise architecture to rival that available to NATO air forces, which routinely train together at well-instrumented ranges in the Mediterranean, North Sea, Canada and the US. Russia also has no equivalent to the large-scale complex air exercises with realistic threat simulation which NATO members hold annually – the most famous of which is Red Flag. As such, it would be unsurprising if most Russian pilots lack the proficiency to operate effectively as part of large, mixed formations executing complex and dynamic missions under fire.
Third, if the VKS were capable of conducting complex air operations, it should have been comparatively simple for them to have achieved air superiority over Ukraine. The small number of remaining Ukrainian fighters, conducting heroic air-defence efforts over their own cities, are forced to operate at low altitudes due to long-range Russian SAM systems and consequently have comparatively limited situational awareness and endurance. They ought to be relatively easily to overwhelm for the far more numerous, better armed and more advanced VKS fighters arranged around the Ukrainian borders. Ukrainian mobile medium- and short-range SAM systems such as SA-11 and SA-15 have had successes against Russian helicopters and fast jets. However, large Russian strike aircraft packages flying at medium or high altitude with escorting fighters would be able to rapidly find and strike any Ukrainian SAMs which unmasked their position by firing at them. They would lose aircraft in the process, but would be able to attrit the remaining SAMs and rapidly establish air superiority.
Russia has every incentive to establish air superiority, and on paper should be more than capable of doing so if it commits to combat operations in large, mixed formations to suppress and hunt down Ukrainian fighters and SAM systems. Instead, the VKS continues to only operate in very small numbers and at low level to minimise the threat from the Ukrainian SAMs. Down low, their situational awareness and combat effectiveness is limited, and they are well within range of the MANPADS such as Igla and Stinger which Ukrainian forces already possess. The numbers of MANPADS are also increasing, as numerous Western countries send supplies to beleaguered Ukrainian forces. To avoid additional losses to MANPADS, sorties continue to be primarily flown at night, which further limits the effectiveness of their mostly unguided air-to-ground weapons.
How Russian propaganda has sold some of the Russian people on Project Z. But Russian troops are finding things quite a different story. Warning: Bodies, and at about 18 seconds in one, I think strewn body parts:
But once they realised that there will be resistance and the war looks like this, their enthusiasm started declining. Which means it will be much harder to find new volunteers to go fight to Ukraine. But you need them. What are you gonna do? pic.twitter.com/ItmwcYSwIe
“Sources have been telling me, sources that are well connected to the Russian Security Services, that the offensive is not going well, that some special forces, the Russian Spetsnaz, are furious because they have been sent into battle without proper support, and many of them have been killed. They say that the national guard forces and the regular army, the national guard forces include those Chechen units, that two of them are not coordinating on the field. And that the overall battle plan is somewhat disjointed in that it’s partly a plan for war and partly a plan for peacekeeping and so-called de-Nazification of this country. And it has led to a lack of cohesion,” Engel reported.
“A lot of this goes back to the man who’s behind it all, Vladimir Putin, who I’m told is now increasingly isolated, is just taking advice from his inner circle, that there are only about three people who matter right now,” Engel continued. “And that speech, you mentioned it a short while ago, that Putin gave yesterday — bizarre location, speaking at Aeroflot, to a group of flight attendants. He sounded incredibly angry. He sounded detached. He was talking about how the Ukrainians here are machine-gunning people, that they’re driving around in cars packed with explosives, jihadi-style. And he went very deep and repeatedly on this theme that they’re fighting against the Nazis. It was the angriest I’ve ever seen him.”
This is from a couple of days ago. Have Spetsnaz pissed off at you doesn’t seem like a good long-term survival strategy for a Russian leader. On the other hand, this report probably deserves some skepticism, since it fits too easily into what we would like to hear about the situation, so some salt is in order. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Ukraine says it has RE-TAKEN Chuhuiv city and killed two high-ranking Russian commanders during the battle.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“A Complete Summary Of All Russia Sanctions And Developments.” Read on for exciting blow-by-blow summaries of foreign exchange surcharges and debt repayment details…
What rolls down stairs/alone and in pairs/and up-armors your Russian truck? Caveat: They call this improvised armor, but it could also be on-hand materials for traction in muddy areas.
U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have reportedly linked up to completely surround Islamic State forces. The Islamic State had already been surrounded on land, but their access to a small stretch of the Euphrates allowed some passage of fighters and supplies. That’s now gone.
Here’s another Livemap screen cap:
Compare that with this screen cap a month ago:
It’s obvious that the SDF have taken more of south and southwestern Raqqa.
The battle is an urban street fight where IS relies on snipers and traps [IEDs]. From what I’ve been able to gather, Islamic State numbers do not exceed 400 fighters.
The SDF is slowly advancing with air support from the coalition.
It’s clear that IS has no intention of giving up easily.
That 400 fighters would be encouraging, if true, but it’s probably too low. Yesterday’s fighting reportedly killed 95 Islamic State fighters, which would suggest they’re quickly running out of fighters, but given the lack of a sudden collapse in Islamic State resistance, this seems unlikely.
Indeed, Syrian Kurdish commander Haval Gabar says that the capture of Raqqa could take up to four months:
“We’ve cleared about half of Old Raqqa … and we’re advancing on all axes,” said Haval Gabar, the 25-year-old commander from the Kurdish YPG militia who is directing the assault on the Old City front in Islamic State’s Syrian stronghold.
Units of the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance dominated by the YPG, fully linked up in Raqqa’s southern districts on Tuesday, encircling the militants in the city center which includes the Old City.
“The day before yesterday there was still a small gap,” Gabar said on Wednesday. “Yesterday it was closed. We are now pressing towards Mansour and Rashid districts.”
If you wonder why those northern battle lines seem static, it’s evidently because they’re heavily mined.
Gabar said that despite resistance, several hundred militants had surrendered themselves, and estimates not more than 1,000 are left. He believes their morale “is zero”.
“Maybe 600 Daesh have surrendered. It’s mostly foreign fighters left in the city now. Those with families tend to be the ones to hand themselves over.”
Gabar said that Chechen snipers were especially deadly.
After a sweeping Syrian military advance to the edge of the besieged Isis “capital” of Raqqa, the Russians, the Syrian army and Kurds of the YPG militia – theoretically allied to the US – have set up a secret “coordination” centre in the desert of eastern Syria to prevent “mistakes” between the Russian-backed and American-supported forces now facing each other across the Euphrates river.
That piece is by Robert Fisk, who says he thinks the Syrian army will be heading toward Deir ez-Zor, where Syrian army units have been besieged by the Islamic State since 2014. But keep in mind this is the man for whom the word “Fisking” was coined, so add as many grains of salt as you see fit…
