Posts Tagged ‘fraud’

LinkSwarm For October 23, 2026

Friday, October 23rd, 2026

Ex-USAID Democrat operatives plan an insurrection, more Democrats behaving badly, two really stupid criminals that openly announce their intention to murder people, more welfare state/SNAP fraud, and Minneapolis restaurant trying to prove socialism works is shocked to discover socialism doesn’t work.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Are Democratic operatives looking to stage a color revolution over the midterms?

    I’m not sure how to start this story, so we are DIVING IN.

    This week, conservative analyst DataRepublican released transcripts, videos, and audio from groups including ex-USAID and national security officials (all Democrat) coordinating to provoke Trump into invoking the Insurrection Act after the 2026 midterms.

    Their plan is simple.

    1. Get Democrats to take control of Congress in the midterms.
    2. Ramp up coordinated, color-revolution riots across the nation, forcing Trump to use the Insurrection Act and the National Guard to quell leftist violence.
    3. Use Democratic governors and congressmen to declare Trump illegitimate and hold a “Third Continental Congress” to rewrite the Constitution and make America communist.
    4. Engage in eternal Marxist revolution.

    Here is a clip of far-left leaders, including former USAID diplomat Danielle Reiff, talking about enacting “extraconstitutional” measures to create “the kind of transformation” the Marxist revolutionaries want.

    I think we have an opportunity – I think the midterms, especially if there’s a meltdown around the midterms in a crisis of legitimacy, could be a real window of opportunity for us to say, ‘Okay, some red lines have been crossed, but what we really need to do is transform our system.’ But in order to do that in November and take advantage of the meltdown scenario, we have to get super, super organized in the next seven months. So I think this is a plan that needs to be on steroids.

    …

    The conversation that we’ve started more broadly is what happens if we need to go extraconstitutional to create the kind of transformation that we’d all like to see. And so, we’ve talked about a sequence of, like, an important convening. Maybe like a Third Continental Congress that actually comes up with a declaration that says, ‘Here are the red lines. If these red lines in our democracy are crossed, we will move into an extraconstitutional process…

    Sounds awful insurrectiony, doesn’t it!

  • “A top Virginia Democrat is facing charges in connection with an alleged bribery, marijuana distribution, and money laundering scheme. Virginia State Senator L. Louise Lucas was charged with five federal offenses involving a cannabis business she co-owns, according to an indictment filed in the Eastern District of Virginia. Those charges include racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute marijuana, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy to commit honest-services fraud and maintaining a drug-involved premises.” Also indicted: Two of her daughters and a nephew.
  • “Oregon dad ignores gun-free zone, stops school shooter who also ignored gun-free zone.” More. 
  • “Declassified Documents Show Ukrainian Diplomat Was Set to Testify About Hunter Biden Before US Revoked His Visa.

    A former Ukrainian diplomat who was at one point set to give negative testimony about Hunter Biden’s business links appears to have wrongly had his visa to the United States revoked, according to newly released documents.

    The White House Task Force on Government Transparency and Election Integrity released the information to reporters late Wednesday about the State Department and Treasury Department taking action in 2020 to revoke the visa of Andrii Telizhenko, the Ukrainian diplomat. Telizhenko had worked for the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington.

    Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin had called him to testify in early 2020, shortly after the first President Donald Trump impeachment, regarding the president’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump inquired about then-former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s links to the energy company Burisma.

    Democrats accused Telizhenko of promoting Russian disinformation.

    Records showed that Telizhenko was friendly to the Obama administration and was opposed to the administration of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

    Federal agencies were not able to establish an evidentiary basis for claiming he was tied to Russia, according to an administration official. A Trump administration official said the records show it was based on “assumptions and newspaper articles.”

    There’s no greater crime than opposing the criminal actions of a Democrat in power. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • More on the “lying to protect Hunter Biden” front: “DOJ Charges Two Former FBI Agents With Lying to Congress About Hunter Biden Probe. The former leaders of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force allegedly misled Congress about their knowledge of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the bureau’s investigation.”

    The Department of Justice charged former FBI agents Nikki Cole Floris and Bradley Benavides for allegedly lying to Congress about their involvement in the Hunter Biden investigation.

    “This morning two former FBI members of the now dissolved Foreign Influence Task Force, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, were taken into custody – charged with allegedly lying to Congress in 2023 on matters regarding investigations related to the 2020 election. One of these individuals is on record privately claiming to be ‘running a shadow government’ during the 2020 election,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “As we’ve said repeatedly: weaponization will never be tolerated at this FBI. We have already dismantled the corrupt CR-15 squad that engaged in political weaponization targeting their opponents, including President Trump – and anyone who abuses their position of public trust will be held accountable.”

    According to the statement of facts, witnesses and documents, Floris and Benavides played active roles in FBI investigations into Hunter Biden between December 2019 and September 2021.

    “In October 2020, both Floris and Benavides worked on the FBI’s internal and Congressional responses to reporting on the FBI’s receipt of Hunter Biden’s laptop, with Floris receiving, discussing, and passing along updates on the investigations through late 2021.”

  • HUGE Drone Strike Hits Saint Petersburg: Data Centre, Ozon Warehouse, Oil Terminal, Bridge All Hit!”
  • “Satellite Imagery of Saint Petersburg After Drone Strike: Oil Terminal, Oil Depot, Ozon Warehouse.” Some big damage, but little visible damage on the bridge strike.
  • And more: “Big Damage Confirmed to Saint Petersburg VK Data Centre.”
  • “Satellite Imagery Shows Big Damage to Vladimir Yandex Data Centre.”
  • “Russian Su-30SM Crashes in Kaliningrad.”
  • Turnabout is fair play: “Ukraine Carries Out Underground Operation Near Kupiansk! Advances 15km Through Pipe.”
  • “A data center operated by Russia’s Federal Tax Service was attacked in Gorodets, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.”
  • “Ukrainian naval drones are becoming mobile air-defense platforms, exploiting the multipurpose Sargan-3000, which is capable of carrying up to four-hundred-and-fifty kilograms of payload and operating as far as one-thousand-and-six-hundred kilometers from its base.”
  • Patrick Boyle argues that the Yandex strikes didn’t slow down troll or bot traffic appreciably. 
  • Ukraine takes out one of North Korea’s longest range self-propelled artillery vehicles being used by Russia.

    The Koksan is North Korea’s longest-range conventional tube-artillery system and one of the most unusual weapons Pyongyang has supplied to Russia. Western intelligence first identified the system in 1979 near the North Korean city of Koksan, which later gave the artillery piece its commonly used Western name.

    The original M1978 Koksan can reportedly strike targets at ranges of up to roughly 40 kilometers with standard ammunition and as far as 60 kilometers with rocket-assisted shells. Its rate of fire is relatively slow at around one to two rounds every five minutes, but its long reach allows it to operate well behind the immediate front line.

    The weapon’s gun is mounted in an open configuration, providing little protection for its estimated four-to-six-person crew.

    The earlier model also requires a separate vehicle to carry ammunition because of the size of the weapon and its shells, while the later M1989 variant can carry around 12 rounds onboard.

    Like much commie Wunderwaffen, it sounds like more of a pain in the ass to use than a real difference-making weapon.

  • “Polling firm Wedgewood Polls admits to completely fabricating election polling for the 2026 midterms.” And three of four senate race polls (including Texas) they released showed Democrats ahead. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • “FBI arrests ‘Most Wanted’ fugitive in India who stole $600k in food stamps.”

    A fugitive accused of stealing more than $600,000 in federal food stamp benefits has been returned to the United States after being arrested in India last month, FBI Director Kash Patel announced.

    Manjit Singh Bedi, one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Fraudsters, was wanted on federal charges stemming from an alleged Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fraud scheme at a grocery store in Tacoma, Washington.

  • “Georgia Instagram personality Shawty Dred indicted on $4 million SNAP card fraud scheme.”

    An Atlanta social media personality has been arrested on federal charges for allegedly stealing millions of dollars in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by using fraudulent accounts, prosecutors say.

    Mercedes Reshard New, who goes by “Shawty Dred” on social media is accused of taking more than $4 million meant to feed poor Georgia families to fund his lavish lifestyle.

    According to investigators with the U.S. District Attorney’s Office of Northern Georgia, New allegedly controlled more than 350 SNAP accounts created using false identities between 2020 and 2026, having the electronic benefit transfer debit cards mailed to multiple addresses around metro Atlanta.

    New also allegedly applied for his company, Shawty Dred LLC, to become an authorized SNAP retailer, allowing him to use the cards for purchases.

    The USDA revoked Shawty Dred LLC’s authorization in 2025, and local police arrested New shortly afterward for allegedly selling SNAP benefits, prosecutors say. The officers seized 14 EBT debit cards, which he promptly requested replacements for.

    In all, federal prosecutors say that New tricked the Georgia Division of Family & Children Services into giving him around $4.6 million in SNAP benefits, which he was able to siphon $4 million from accounts. All the while, prosecutors say he had flaunted flying on private jets, posing with luxury vehicles, and calling other people “broke motherf****s” on social media.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • The Democrat Party is proving they are exactly who we thought they are. “Democratic nominee for Wisconsin Secretary of State says her ‘number one priority’ is giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.”

    JoCasta Zamarripa: My number one priority is to see the governor sign driver’s licenses for undocumented Wisconsinites into law … Driver’s licenses for undocumented Wisconsinites is going to improve the public safety for all Wisconsinites. Whether they’re fifth generation US citizens or whether they’re newly arrived immigrant because it’s going to be more folks with a driver’s license driving on our roads.

    Her number one priority! Nothing is more important to her than this!

    Not crime reduction. Not the economy. Not affordability. Not jobs. Not even giving the Wisconsin Badgers the NIL money to become relevant in college sports again.

    Just your regular reminder that the average Democrat candidate, even in the conservative-leaning Midwest, wants to invite the entire world to live in America and fundamentally destroy the land built by our forefathers.

  • “Comptroller Huffines Bars Taxpayer Funding for Discriminatory DEI Programs.”

    Comptroller Don Huffines has issued an executive order prohibiting taxpayer funds administered through his agency from supporting discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

    The order requires contractors and grant recipients working with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts to certify that their state-funded activities do not involve discriminatory DEI practices. Agreements will also include provisions allowing the agency to terminate contracts immediately for violations.

    Under the order, discriminatory DEI practices include preferential or unequal treatment based on race, color, ethnicity, religion, age, sex, or national origin in recruitment, hiring, contracting, program participation, or the use of state resources.

    “The radical left turned diversity, equity, and inclusion into a racket, and taxpayers got stuck with the bill,” Huffines said. “Woke DEI is discrimination, plain and simple. It sorts Texans by skin color and sex, punishes merit, and funnels money to consultants who produce nothing.”

    Huffines said the comptroller’s office handles thousands of contracts and grants involving hundreds of state agencies and thousands of local governments, making the new requirements applicable to a broad range of state-funded agreements.

    “Every contractor and every grantee is on notice. Hire the best, promote the best, and serve every Texan the same, and you will do just fine,” Huffines said. “Push woke DEI with taxpayer money, and we will terminate your agreement on the spot.”

  • Hmmm: “Speaker Burrows Says Texas House to Investigate Truthfulness of Testimony from Travis County DA’s Office.”

    Holly Hansen: In that testimony, there were some questions about the Travis County District Attorney’s Office and other district attorneys’ offices around the state, and a possible relationship with a progressive reform group known as the Wren Collective.

    Did any of that surprise you, or are there additional concerns about what may be happening there?

    Dustin Burrows: There are absolutely additional concerns. I think all Texans should be concerned with what was exposed during that hearing. I mean, there’s evidence that the Wren Collective communicated with Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzalez and his first Assistant District Attorney Christian Hendrickson about prosecutorial policies involving bail, sentencing, and plea guidelines.

    We saw that there was a non-disclosure agreement that was in place. Lots of questions raised. We also know that there’s been a ton of money that has been poured into these races by progressive mega-donors like George Soros. They’re literally spending millions of dollars backing district attorney candidates throughout the state.

    Remember that Wren Collective is a radical leftwing social justice organization that never met a minority criminal it didn’t love, nor a cop it didn’t hate.

  • Unlikely: “70% of the Moroccans who invaded Ceuta claimed to be gay in their asylum requests to the Spanish government.”
  • “Seattle judge decides mass shooter should be released to home detention.”

    A judge has ordered the release of a teenage suspect charged in the deadly mass shooting at the Bite of Seattle festival to home detention on electronic home monitoring, overriding objections from prosecutors who argued he remains a severe threat to community safety.

    The teen suspect faces charges of first-degree assault with a firearm enhancement and second-degree unlawful possession of a firearm. Court documents show the State is seeking to decline juvenile jurisdiction and try him as an adult.

  • “Fort Bend County Tax-Assessor-Collector Arrested on Federal Fraud Charges. Carmen Turner allegedly created fraudulent positions at taxpayer expense.”

    Fort Bend County Tax-Assessor-Collector Carmen Turner and two co-conspirators were arrested Thursday on charges including conspiracy to commit fraud, theft of government funds and benefits, and wire fraud related to a scheme that included fraudulent positions in her office at taxpayers’ expense.

    “If you did not already hate tax collectors enough already, we’re going to give you a few more reasons to do so today,” said Aaron Reitz, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, during a press conference in Houston on Thursday.

    According to the federal indictments, Turner hired Shemerrylyn Regina Fields as a deputy tax clerk but then allegedly tasked Fields with providing full-time care for Turner’s elderly mother. Turner also hired Victor Ewing, the father of her adult child, as a department coordinator — a position Reitz said was “fake.”

    Although Ewing drew a Fort Bend County paycheck, he reportedly lived in Chicago and worked at another full-time job at O’Hare Airport. Reitz said Ewing then sent payments back to Turner in what he characterized as an alleged “kickback” scheme.

    “Carmen Turner has been strutting around Fort Bend County with the title The Honorable for years. Nothing could be more dishonorable—or illegal—than her and her conspirators’ public corruption,” Reitz said. “The people of the Southern District of Texas have my commitment to do everything we can to do justice and make it right. Taxpayers deserve so much better.”

    Jason Hudson, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Houston Division, said that Turner allegedly instructed Fields to lie about her work on Fort Bend County time sheets, and that the fraudulent activity took place from about September 2023 to September 2025.

    I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Turner is a Democrat…

  • Yes, the really want to trans your kids. “Children across Texas were just mailed instructions on how to ‘transition.'” Something called the “Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT)” seems to be behind the mailers, despite their denials.
  • “California Elementary Schools Teach ‘Cisheteropatriarchy’ and ‘Decolonization,’ House Probe Finds.”

    In Berkeley, Calif., elementary schoolers are learning about “cisgenderpatriarchy,” “ableism,” and “decolonization,” a House Education Committee investigation found.

    Representative Tim Walberg commissioned the investigation following an uptick in antisemitic incidents after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks against Israel. While the report, which was shared with National Review, documents instances of antisemitism in all three school districts the committee examined, investigators also found a broader pattern of left-wing bias that shapes how young children are being taught history, reading, geography, economics, and other subjects.

    In some instances teachers and National Education Association union leaders discouraged colleagues from sharing certain controversial lessons “directly with families.” One such lesson aimed to teach Berkeley students about Israel and Palestine. Lesson plans obtained by the committee claimed that “from the river to the sea” — a popular activist slogan that calls for the elimination of the state of Israel — can be “a call for freedom and peace.” The same lesson avoided describing Hamas as a terrorist organization.

    Berkeley’s ethnic studies curriculum offers several examples of how these political themes enter the classroom.

    In fourth-grade ethnic studies, Berkeley Unified School District teachers asked nine-year-olds to define “covert resistance” and “overt resistance.” Teachers also introduced the terms of “colonization,” “decolonization,” and “settler.” With these new definitions in mind, the curriculum explained that history “is often presented from a colonizer’s perspective” and expressed the importance of “decolonizing historical narratives.”

    The district’s fifth-grade ethnic studies curriculum takes a similar approach to civics. A unit titled “defining democracy” sought to “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”

    When teaching about the Founding Fathers, Berkeley’s fourth-grade curriculum aimed to “challenge imperialist/colonial hegemonic beliefs and practices on the ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels.” The term “Founding Fathers,” the lesson says, is “harmful because it does not acknowledge the Indigenous communities who lived here before colonization.”

    The investigation found similar politicization in the School District of Philadelphia. A lesson taught to ninth graders linked capitalism to imperialism and colonialism.

    Social justice corrupts everything it touches.

  • “Shopping app Temu will pay Texas $3 million, store Texans’ personal data on U.S. servers, and submit to independent compliance audits under a new settlement Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Friday.”

    The settlement comes after Paxton sued PDD Holdings, Inc. and WhaleCo Inc., which conducts business as Temu, earlier this year for harvesting the personal information of customers and exposing it to the Chinese Communist Party.

    In the lawsuit, Paxton alleged that the company violated Texas law “by engaging in false pricing schemes, misrepresenting the quality of its goods, and covertly mining the data of Texans.”

    Paxton also called the shopping app “a Trojan horse” that has the ability to bypass security protocols and allow “backdoor access” to a user’s private data, all under the guise of an avenue to buy “affordable great products.”

    Although Temu’s principal offices currently are located in Ireland, Paxton says that the company has maintained significant operational ties to China, which is where it was originally founded.

    Temu has also been accused of selling products that contain harmful chemicals, such as PFAS, posing health risks to consumers.

    Eh. $3 million seems pretty low to me…

  • There’s stupid, there’s turbo-stupid, and then there’s live-streaming yourself trying to kill a cop…with a brick.
  • There’s not a facepalm big enough. “A person claiming responsibility for the breach of Denmark’s Central Register of Persons (CPR) says they gained access through an IT company’s account protected by the password ‘123456.’”
  • Elon Musk invests $1 billion into Skydance. Live look at Hollywood liberals:

  • Comic Creator Matt Howarth, RIP.
  • Interesting interview with Top Gear/Grand Tour presenter Richard Hammond.
  • “Minneapolis restaurant with no prices will close after years of ‘trying to prove’ that socialism works.” Let’s brush this off:

  • I can’t remember whether I featured these mad Brit slow mo lads here or on Futuramen, but here they’re attaching heavy things to a high speed mechanical whip and hurling them at object. Much silly insanity ensues.
  • Speaking of silly hilarity, Kentucky Ballistics tests the power of various calibers to penetrate giant marshmallows…including the British Boys Antitank Rifle.
  • I’ve got a new Lame Excuse Books catalog of science fiction, fantasy and horror coming out next week. Drop me a line if you want to get a copy of it emailed to you.
  • “Man Frustrated By Gas Prices Votes To Start Castrating Kids Again.”
  • “Nation Of France Films Massive Campaign Ad For Republicans.”
  • “French Protesters Demand More Socialism To Fix Problems Caused By Socialism.”
  • “Ilhan Omar Says She Didn’t Know She’d Married Her Brother As They Were Separated At Birth And Hidden From Their Father, Darth Vader.”
  • “God Pulls Back Even With Gavin Newsom In Race To Destroy California.
  • “Trump Criticized For Choosing New Press Secretary Jessica Rabbit.”
  • Shelter dog gets adopted after four years:

  • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Forget LA to SF: California Democrats Can’t Even Build A 2.25 Mile Rail System

    Wednesday, October 21st, 2026

    We’ve long derided California’s never-to-be-built “high speed” train to nowhere, which was going to spend (at last count) $135 billion to (in theory) build a 494 mile rail network connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco. But forget that. Thanks to the magic power of Democrat governance, Los Angeles can’t even build a 2.25 mile rail system for its airport.

    Democrat-run California is the place where delivery never has any relationship to the promise, the cost estimate never comes close to suggesting the actual cost, the scheduled completion date is an open joke, and the failures and misunderstandings descend into allegations so bizarre they seem like a series of Mad Libs answers.

    With the summer Olympics bringing crowds to Los Angeles in 2028, the City of Los Angeles decided to reduce traffic congestion at its famously nightmarish airport, LAX, by at-long-last linking the terminals and off-site rental car facilities with an automated train. The 2.25-mile SkyLink project was approved in 2018 and broke ground in 2019, with a promised opening date of 2023, at a budgeted construction cost of $1.9 billion.

    A rail system shouldn’t cost close to a billion dollars a mile, unless you’re having to tunnel under downtown London or Manhattan. You could have put in a dedicated bus or trolley lane for well under 1/10th of that price. But that wouldn’t have offered nearly as many opportunities for graft.

    A larger dollar figure cited in that approval, totaling just under $5 billion, was supposed to be the cost of construction plus the cost of operating the system, covering the first thirty years of the project.

    Today, the project is hoping to start serving passengers sometime in 2027, and construction costs alone are expected to top $3 billion. The empty trains slowly circle the airport, being tested again after recent structural failures that caused damage and uncertainty.

    To understand everything that comes next, you’ll need to know the abbreviations for the two entities that make up SkyLink’s public-private construction partnership: Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), an agency of the City of Los Angeles, and LAX Express Integrated Solutions (LINXS), a Delaware LLC created in 2018 by the consortium of construction and engineering contractors who are building the project.

    I’m skipping over all the various physical defects (including electric arcing) the system has experienced. Third rail electric systems have only been around since the late 19th century, so you’d think this would be a solved problem by now. But here’s a paragraph that confirms that vaunted efficiency Los Angeles has enjoyed under Karen Bass is still working its magic:

    On 8/13/26, LINXS Constructors was informed by LAWA personnel that a fire alarm control panel was vandalized at 351 World Way (WCTA). It was also reported that a police report had been filed for the incident. LINXS Constructors has made attempts to obtain the police report # from the LAWA personnel who have refused to provide it. In response, LINXS Constructors started its own investigation to see if its equipment (i.e. fire alarm control panels) had been vandalized. LINXS Constructors identified that on 8/12/2026 that someone (suspected to be a LAWA employee) entered LINXS Constructors’ construction site without permission and removed the key cylinder to LINXS’ Fire Command Center on the first floor of the Parking Garage 3.5 (LINXS Constructors’ construction site). LINXS Constructors did not provide any LAWA personnel permission to enter its space and remove LINXS Constructors’ key cylinder from LINXS Constructors’ door, nor permission to enter LINXS Constructors’ space under any circumstances without LINXS Constructors’ knowledge. LAWA personnel have continued to enter LINXS Constructors’ space without LINXS Constructors’ consent after the removal of LINXS Constructors’ key cylinder. LINXS Constructors’ no longer has access to its space and equipment and materials due to LAWA’s trespass and breach of contract.

    This is no way to run even the most basic construction site, much less a railroad.

    Reflecting those themes of suspicion and hostility, a breach of contract lawsuit filed against the city in July by the LINXS consortium of contractors lays out a set of complicated grievances that are unlikely to be resolved in a hurry, producing extraordinary counterclaims from city officials.

    Snip.

    The SkyLink project is part of LAWA’s Landside Access Modernization Program (LAMP) a much larger effort to improve the streets and traffic on the “landside,” rather than the “airside,” of the airport. (So yes: LAWA LAMP.)

    LINXS charges in its lawsuit that the long list of other contractors working on other LAMP projects are pirating electricity from the SkyLink project, improperly entering closed SkyLink construction areas, and performing demolition work on completed elements of the SkyLink system that get in their way.

    Don’t miss that last part: The people who are building the automated train system at LAX allege that other LAWA contractors are destroying their work as they finish it. LINXS depicts their construction project as a fight against the destructive efforts of the people who commissioned their construction project.

    Finally, the LINXS lawsuit gets especially ugly with an explosive claim that LAWA is deliberately trying to prevent the contractors from successfully completing the project, allegedly so the city can dodge political accountability for the delays and avoid paying contractual penalties to the contractors, as a start.

    Conditions from project lenders meant that the delays allegedly caused by LAWA threatened LINXS with financial catastrophe, as an October 8 deadline for project completion presaged a failure that could cause the project’s lenders to call in their loans. The deadline passed, and the lenders granted a reprieve, but a new financial deadline arrives in December.

    But then we get to Paragraph 124 of the complaint, the angry heart of the current court battle. This is where LINXS alleges that LAWA is deliberately making an effort to cause the project to fail so that it can be taken over and given to someone else:

    A whole lot can go wrong on a building project, but active malevolence on the part of the people who contracted the project out is some new level of Project Hell.

    And this is why a project that was supposed to be done in 2023 for less than $2 billion is still far from done and reportedly at least a billion dollars over budget.

    The obvious unspoken assumption here is that LINXS just wasn’t providing enough graft to local officials, so LAWA is going to take the project away from them and give it to local cronies who will kickback more graft into local Democrat pockets…

    LinkSwarm For October 16, 2026

    Friday, October 16th, 2026

    Your tax dollars help fund Hamas (and Brazil’s leftist censorship regime), Kathy Hochul and Gavin Newsom will do anything to keep Trump from deporting illegal aliens, Ukraine hits more natural gas facilities and data centers, and actually knocks some Russian trolls offline, a reckoning is finally coming for Ilhan Omar’s misdeeds, Musk unveils a flying car, and Hasan Piker endorses lynching black people. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Your tax dollars at work: “Louisiana Muslims Were on Medicaid While Sending Money to Terrorists.”

    Between late 2023 and early this year, Abdel Adhami allegedly transferred more than $83,000, mostly through PayPal to financial associates of a Gaza-based contact who converted the funds into Tether cryptocurrency. Court records say about $2,000 was sent directly to Gaza through Western Union to a recipient who picked up the cash in October 2023.

    His brother, Omar, is accused of sending about $6,000 through similar channels. Authorities say the money was ultimately routed to people associated with Saleem Alzaq, whom investigators describe as the brothers’ alleged handler in Gaza.

    For example, on or about October 18, 2023, Adhami, via Snapchat account aadhami56, sent a voice message to Snapchat account “saleem_alzaq” stating the following: “I wish we could come, I wish we could help you, I wish we could do Jihad with you, you are the people of Jihad, you are the people of perseverance, you are who the Prophet, peace and prayer be upon him, has mentioned. Congratulations, congratulations, you are the free ones, not us eh . . . and let me know when you receive the wire transfer. If there is anything we can do, our lives and money and everything are at your service.”

    While all this was going on, the Adhamis were on Medicaid despite having their own stores and plenty of money to send to terrorists.

    A Slidell man who declined to be identified said he remembers the day federal agents raided their Slidell beauty store last month. The brothers also own a beauty store in Hammond.

    Two stores. Terror cash. And hundreds of thousands in Medicaid benefits.

    The wives of two Northshore brothers accused of helping funnel money to Hamas have been arrested along with another family member in a separate Medicaid fraud investigation.

    The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office accuse the five of defrauding the Louisiana Medicaid program of more than $224,000 in benefits between 2021 and 2025.

    Abdel Adhami, 35, and his wife, H.D. Srour, 29, received $113,344 in Medicaid benefits, according to the AG’s Office. They each face five counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.

    Omar Adhami, 33, and his wife, Abu Zenah, 28, received $81,099 in Medicaid benefits. They each face three counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.

    Their brother, Mohammad I. Adhami, 32, received $30,197 in Medicaid benefits. He faces three counts of government benefits fraud and one count of theft of more than $25,000.

  • “New York Refused 16,070 ICE Detainers for Illegal Aliens Accused of Serious Crimes. Gov. Kathy Hochul has made it harder for state and local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE.”

    New York has declined 16,070 ICE detainers for illegal aliens accused or convicted of over 50,000 serious crimes since President Donald Trump took office.

    “While sanctuary politicians continue to release dangerous criminals onto their streets, our brave law enforcement officers will continue to risk their lives to arrest these heinous criminals and make America safe again. Illegal aliens have no sanctuary in America,” said DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. “We enforce these laws with no help from Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul. The Trump Administration is committed to protecting the American people in every city and every state, and we won’t let sanctuary politicians stand in our way. If you’re a state or local politician, your best bet is to cooperate with us so we can all make America safe again.”

    Those crimes include murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault:

    • Homicides: 131
    • Kidnappings: 132
    • Sexual offenses: 1,017
    • DUIs: 1,561
    • Burglaries: 1,631
    • Robberies: 1,776
    • Weapons offenses: 2,198
    • Dangerous drugs: 4,324
    • Assaults: 9,502

    The ICE detainers ask local and state law enforcement to hold illegal aliens for 48 hours so agents can take custody of them.

    But sanctuary states like New York and sanctuary cities like New York City brush off any cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

    Two illegal aliens, Dangelo Rafael Jean Caraballo and Sneider Mejia Bautista, allegedly stabbed an NYPD detective on October 2.

    Both men have a lengthy rap sheet.

    Local law enforcement released Caraballo after his December 2024 arrest for possession of burglar’s tools before ICE could lodge a detainer.

    ICE lodged a detainer for Bautista after his October 2025 arrest for criminal possession of a weapon. The NYPD declined the detainer and released him.

    Caraballo and Bautista ran to Massachusetts, another sanctuary state, for cover. Both were caught and arrested, but it’s unclear whether New York will hand them over to ICE.

    Hochul signed her sanctuary state bill in May 2026. The law bars ICE agents from public places, and local law enforcement cannot cooperate with ICE.

    Most public employees also cannot interact with federal immigration authorities unless they present a judicial warrant.

    Hochul expanded her anti-ICE agenda in August with the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act, which bans local law enforcement from entering or maintaining any agreements with ICE.

    In February, Mamdani signed an executive order to strengthen sanctuary laws in New York City.

    Trump should flood New York with ICE agents and dare Hochul to arrest them.

  • Finally: “Feds Raid Ilhan Omar’s DC Home As Immigration Fraud Investigation Heats Up.”

    Federal agents raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) early Monday morning as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Somali-born congresswoman’s immigration paperwork, according to Fox News.

    The pre-dawn operation began around 6 a.m., with multiple agents wearing Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) jackets observed outside the residence. Two sources close to the investigation told Fox News that authorities are examining immigration documents completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.

    Snip.

    As Jonathan Turley previously noted, Homan confirmed that federal authorities were examining allegations involving the Minnesota Democrat.

    The controversy centers in part on longstanding claims that Omar married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, to facilitate an immigration benefit – allegations Omar has repeatedly denied and which have not been established as fact.

    Turley examined whether the allegations could support a fraud case or instead amounted to potentially defamatory accusations, and noted that the statute of limitations could complicate any prosecution involving events dating back many years.

    (Powerline has been working this beat a long, long time.)

  • “Nine Major Banks ‘Denied, Debanked, and Discriminated Against’ Conservatives.”

    A new federal report finds “irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against” conservatives, religious organizations and lawful businesses because of their political beliefs or activities.

    The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released the results of its investigation into the nine largest banks it supervises in a 47-page report on Wednesday. Those banks include JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank and BMO Bank.

    The revelations in the report include allegations that JPMorgan Chase’s former payment processor WePay closed accounts belonging to merchants selling Trump and Make America Great Again merchandise after the bank’s screening system apparently flagged phrases including “MAGA,” “Make America Great,” and “America First.”

    The report also accuses WePay of closing accounts associated with conservative religious organizations, including one that was labeled an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

    PNC, meanwhile, allegedly denied a line of credit to a media company after employees argued the company’s conservative owners had expressed opinions “very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values.”

    Wells Fargo pushed a payment processor to debank a religious nonprofit over its opposition to same-sex marriage, and also declined loans to firearms businesses amid concerns about potential Biden administration pressure, the report found.

  • “Trump Admin Sues California Over 20,000 Suspected Ineligible Voters Ahead Of Midterms.”

    The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against California and two election officials, seeking to prevent approximately 20,000 potentially ineligible voters from having their ballots counted in November’s midterm elections until their citizenship status can be verified.

    The Justice Department alleges that California is knowingly allowing noncitizens to participate in federal elections, raising concerns about election integrity just weeks before voters head to the polls.

    “State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.

    “If found responsible in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated laws that protect our nation’s representative system of government,” Blanche added.

    According to the lawsuit, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators identified potentially ineligible voters using federal immigration records and information from the Social Security Administration and State Department.

    The Justice Department previously sent Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan a password-protected drive containing more than 20,000 voter records, demanding citizenship verification within 48 hours.

    Logan responded that his office would follow applicable federal and state election laws while maintaining accurate voter registration records.

    The administration is now asking a federal court to prevent ballots associated with those voters from being counted until their eligibility is established.

    Democrats will use every opportunity to get illegal alien votes into the ballot box.

  • “Very Long Range Drone Strike on Surgut Condensate Stabilization Plant (2,500km!).” This is a Gazprom natural gas facility.
  • “Big Drone Strike on Novoshakhtinsk Oil Terminal in Rostov.”
  • Followup: “Satellite Imagery Show Extensive Damage to Rostov Oil Export Terminal & Samara Pumping Station.”
  • “Ukraine Hits Third Russian Data Centre (In Vladmir).”
  • But wait! “Vladimir’s Yandex Data Centre Hit By Drones Again!” How often will I get a chance to embed this?

  • “Ukraine Hits Russia’s Newest Data Centre! In Balakovo, Samara.” This was a data center for Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.
  • “Four Su-34 Confirmed Destroyed at Borisoglebsk Air Base After Neptune Missile Strike!”
  • “Big F-16 Air Strike on Two Pontoon Crossings Near Velyka Novosilka, Donetsk.”
  • For some reason, a Russian tank base that was all but empty is now filling up with T-90Ms that aren’t being sent to Ukraine. The drone threat, or lack of qualified tank crews?
  • Result? “Russian bot traffic decimated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes knock multiple Yandex data centers offline.” You know, Comrade Cartridge has been pretty quiet since August…
  • What Hasan Piker really thinks of black people.

    Does anyone doubt that if a white conservative “joked” about lynching black people the media would turn it into a full-in, front page onslaught to cancel him?

  • “”Full-On Truman Show”: Former State Dept. Official Exposes USAID’s Censorship Machine In Brazil.”

    Former State Department official Mike Benz laid out USAID’s sweeping involvement in Brazil’s political and institutional landscape, detailing a network of American funding that reached media organizations, universities, activist groups and organizations involved with the country’s election system.

    Benz, who serves as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, broke down the extent of USAID’s footprint during an appearance on “The Benny Show” with host Benny Johnson.

    “What’s happening in Brazil was a full-on Truman show. You had the media funded by USAID. You had the universities funded by USAID. You had the staffers of the Supreme Court and the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), the election court, USAID. You had all the constitutional law advocates funded by USAID. You had the LGBT activists funded by USAID,” Benz explained.

    “It’s full spectrum. If you were to walk down a city block in Sao Paulo or, I don’t know, Brasilia, you would have a 360 vision of institutions funded and puppeteered by USAID without ever knowing it,” the former State Department official added. “In fact, USAID, knowing what they were doing, and I need to be careful about what I can and can’t say here, let’s just say, would anyone be surprised, for example, if USAID was going around and telling its grantees in Brazil to remove the USAID logo so that it doesn’t get out that grantee’s connection to USAID?”

    Benz said USAID’s influence could continue even after its funding disappeared because institutional and legal changes remained in place.

    “They knew what they were doing. They knew how sensitive it was. Would you be surprised, for example, if USAID, which basically set up the censorship state in Brazil, and this is actually something, let me quickly pivot to say, it is true that this is the first Brazilian election since the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil that does not have USAID money slushing around Lula and his allies, but is still an election that is in many ways under the thumb of the ghost of USAID,” he said. “There is something I call kind of the clockmaker’s dilemma, which is USAID, even when you remove it, the institutional and legal changes that a country goes through can live on even if you cut USAID funding down to zero.”

    Benz then zeroed in on two of Brazil’s most powerful institutions, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and Superior Electoral Court (TSE): “For example, in Brazil, you have this apparatus through the STF and TSE, the Supreme Court and the basically election court that determines all things around elections, and basically after Bolsonaro won in 2018, the TSE court with Alexandre de Moraes, the famous Voldemort judge, they declared disinformation a threat to free and fair elections, not just disinformation during an election season, but disinformation any time, misinformation, disinformation any time about anything because it could pollute people’s, I don’t know, sense of what’s true or false in the information ecosystem, and so it could have an impact on an election three years away if this false information is allowed to circulate online.”

    Benz also went into detail about USAID’s connections to Brazil’s election and judicial establishment.

    “That was set up by USAID, USAID flooded the zone, USAID had contact at every level with the TSE court, with the Alexandre de Moraes court,” he said. “I testified to the Brazilian Senate Relations Committee and put pictures from USAID’s website of Alexandre de Moraes being trained by CEPS (Competitive Economy Program), the USAID grantee, by NED (National Endowment for Democracy), the USAID grantee has gotten $3 billion from USAID and was created by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

    So American taxpayers were footing the bill for the suborning of democracy in favor of leftwing control and censorship.

  • “Days after federal agents stopped an 18-year-old of Somali descent from buying an AK-47 to kill dozens at the Mall of America in an ISIS-inspired plot, another 18-year-old Somali is free after police say he opened fire outside a high school homecoming game.”

    Investigators linked the Eden Prairie shooting to rival Somali gangs. The accused spent just two nights in jail before posting a $100,000 bond with $10,000 cash down. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty had said he would be held accountable.

    On October 2, during Eden Prairie High School’s homecoming football game against Minnetonka, a fight involving about 10 people broke out in a parking lot after two vehicles arrived. Surveillance video showed a Hyundai Sonata, registered to the brother of Adam Abdihakeem Adam, 18, of St. Louis Park, enter the area.

    harging documents state Adam was the only occupant. He got out, fired a single shot, struck two teenagers, and fled. The victims were an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old, both Somali males from St. Paul known to law enforcement and not students at either school. One was shot through the leg; the other in the foot. Both injuries were non-life-threatening. The stadium was evacuated and the game postponed.

    Investigators used phone location data that tracked Adam and the vehicle before, during, and after the shooting. He abandoned the phone and changed its number. A search of his home recovered clothing consistent with what the shooter wore on video.

    Eden Prairie police arrested him without incident on October 8 in Minneapolis with help from partner agencies. Police Chief Matt Sackett said, “The arrest today is an important step in this investigation. I’m incredibly proud of our officers and investigators who have worked nonstop alongside our law enforcement partners to identify those responsible and hold them accountable.”

    Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged Adam with two counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of second-degree riot while armed with a dangerous weapon. She stated: “This was an alarming and dangerous act that injured two people and frightened many more. Mr. Adam will be held accountable.” She added, “Violence in our communities is completely unacceptable and it requires a professional, coordinated response, which happened here.”

    Bail was set at $100,000 and Adam posted bond and was released on October 10.

  • “‘Celebrate the Demographic Change’: Inside the Big-Money Campaign to Sell Rural America on Immigration. Foundation money, local forums, festivals and messaging training: how a national advocacy network works to change small-town attitudes toward immigration.”

    For years, Welcoming America has been building a campaign to sell rural communities on immigration—training local leaders, supporting public events and teaching advocates how to change their neighbors’ minds.

    Its own rural refugee toolkit describes the role of local media plainly:

    “a positive force for changing public opinion”

    The same guide praises storytelling used to:

    “celebrate the demographic change of the community.”

    “reshape the narrative about immigrants in new destination states”

  • “Trump Admin has Arrested 1,296 Tren de Aragua Gang Members. The admin has charged almost 350 members and associates with federal crimes.”

    “President Trump created the Homeland Security Task Force to eradicate gangs, cartels, and transnational criminal organizations who entered the United States, and operated with impunity, as a result of the Biden administration’s disastrous open border policies,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Washington Examiner. “Our message to Tren de Aragua and all the transnational criminal organizations is simple: we will dismantle your networks, seize your profits, and put the safety of the American people first. The days of vicious gangs, like TdA, profiting off of the death of American citizens is over.”

    On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order forming the Homeland Security Task Forces with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

    “The objective of each HSTF is to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States, dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking networks, end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children, and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States,” according to the executive order.

    The data runs from January 20, 2025, to October 8, 2026. The task force has nabbed 1,296 Trn de Aragua members and charged almost 350 members and associates with federal crimes.

    “President Trump’s Homeland Security Task Forces have encountered TdA gang members [in] almost every state,” an ICE spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Washington Examiner. “This is one of the most vicious gangs on planet earth. They rape, maim, and murder for sport.”

  • “Months after opening, workers at Obama’s presidential center are unionizing due to horrid job conditions.”

    Nearly four months after the Obama Presidential Center opened, workers are organizing a union, citing “increasing workloads” and benefit rollbacks that have stirred concerns about their future with the organization.

    Fifteen weeks working for Barack H. Obama and these folks have gone full Newsies. 😂

    If the Barack Obama library is an unpleasant place to work, you won’t find me surprised. In any event, here’s what the library’s workers have alleged:

    • They are facing “increasing workloads.” That’s, um, sort of to be expected in the weeks after a major new facility opens and everyone’s still figuring out what work needs to be done. But okay.
    • They have “seen our benefits rolled back.” After just four months? That was quick! But I guess even the Obamacare Machine realized that offering full insurance to part-time administrative workers wasn’t financially feasible.
    • “Support from leadership,” meanwhile, has been “minimal.” Concerns about working conditions have been met with “vague responses.”
    • This unbearable, horrific working environment has contributed to a high turnover rate.

    The workers have announced that they are forming a labor coalition, Obama Workers United, with AFSCME Council 31.

  • When the mayor of San Francisco says his party has gone too far left, perhaps Democrats ought to listen.

    San Francisco’s Democratic mayor, Daniel Lurie, says he’s a proud progressive, but in a recent interview, Lurie acknowledged to CNN’s Dana Bash that on issues like crime, homelessness, drug use, housing, and affordability, the city getting “so entrapped in our progressive values” caused it to lose its way and go down the wrong path.

    Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir with no political experience, was elected in November 2024, defeating the much better-known incumbent Democratic mayor, London Breed, in part because he promised to clean up the drug-infested streets and be tougher on crime.

    In one situation from October 2025 that got a lot of national attention, Lurie was able to convince President Trump to back off sending a “surge” of National Guard troops into the city to help combat crime, successfully arguing to allow local law enforcement to work to turn things around in “continued partnerships” with the FBI, ATF, etc.:

    “We have work to do, and we would welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Attorney to get drugs and drug dealers off our streets, but having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery,” he added. “We appreciate that the president understands that we are the global hub for technology, and when San Francisco is strong, our country is strong.”

    In the CNN interview, Lurie noted that there was nothing progressive about overdose deaths, car break-ins, women feeling unsafe walking to their cars, and local businesses having to close because of repeat offenders.

    Lurie’s social justice comrades have decided those are precisely the outcomes they desire…

  • Funny how every two years 90 days before the election, a big sexual abuse case seems to come before a Democrat judge.
  • Brandon Herrera’s 23rd Congressional District Democrat opponent Katy Stout isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. “Texas Democrat accidentally blasts opponent for ‘making fun of Nazis’ during live debate.” And if there’s ever been an apt last name…
  • Lennar and Millrose have a human centipede home selling ecosystem. Lennar makes the homes and owns Millrose, who buys the homes to rent out. And mysteriously helped Lennar hit their quarterly home-sale numbers.

  • At least he was ambitious. “ICE to deport illegal alien who pretended to be part of DHS and sold deportation “immunity” cards to other illegal aliens.”

    [Mario Cesar Dos Santos Jr.] Brazilian illegal immigrant who admitted to creating a fake branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and selling counterfeit DHS and FBI identification cards — which he claimed would provide immunity from federal immigration officers — has been ordered deported …

    As part of the scheme, Dos Santos claimed to be the president of the ‘Chaplain Emergency Management Agency’ (CEMA), a fictitious federal agency he created to trick attendees at training seminars into paying for immunity from immigration enforcement.

    While the training courses were offered for free, participants were charged $400 to $450 for bogus certificates they believed would protect them from deportation, authorities said. Each seminar drew approximately 30 to 45 participants.

  • In the UK, of course. “Fifteen-Year-Old Boy Is Arrested After Joking About How A Politician Dresses.”

    The leader of the Conservative Party on the Wolverhampton City Council, Simon Bennett, apparently can take anything but fashion criticism. The politician reportedly called the police on a 15-year-old boy for mocking his clothing style at meetings. It is the latest example of the collapse of free speech in the United Kingdom.

    A boy only identified as “Fraser” is a 15-year-old supporter of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. He found himself searched and arrested by four officers from the West Midlands Police at his home, locked in a cell, fingerprinted, subjected to a DNA search, and taken for a mugshot. The police then searched his bedroom and telephone.

    All of this was over his joking about how Bennett dressed in public.

  • “Georgia Bought a $954,578 Chevy, but Officials Won’t Say What’s Inside.” “Records obtained through Georgia’s open-records law show that Georgia purchased a 2026 Traverse in April from Hardy Chevrolet GMC. Its listed “TSE cellular communications package” cost $890,478.80, with another $25,394 for installation. The rest went to equipment officials won’t identify publicly, even as state lawmakers question whether a child-welfare agency should have technology normally associated with criminal investigations.”

    The Center Square reported last month how the department spent $639,000 on four other police-grade technologies that surveil web activity, extract the contents of cell phones and track cell phone locations. The prospect of the department spending nearly $1 million more on yet another surveillance tool—one that’s mobile and far more invasive—has lawmakers raising Fourth Amendment concerns, the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

    “They are not a law enforcement agency, and my understanding is that that type of equipment is only supposed to go to law enforcement agencies,” state Rep. Beth Camp, R-Concord, told The Center Square after the news wire informed her of the spending. “That is surveillance. That is spy surveillance.”

    Something pretty funny is going on. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Jerry Seinfeld tells pro-Palestine heckler he’s giving her ticket money to Israel.”
  • Borepatch on why the New World didn’t discover Europe.

    In the year 1000 A.D. an unbiased world observer would never have picked Europe as the region that would dominate the globe. Probably they would pick China with its massive population or fabulously wealthy India. The Islamic Caliphate would have looked past its sell-by date but would have beaten Europe by a mile.

    Snip.

    In this day and age – and particularly on Columbus Day – it is frowned upon to ask these questions. The Powers That Be tell us that Europe got rich by stealing indigenous people’s wealth, conveniently ignoring the many other non-European powers that were much more brutal at doing that than the Europeans were. The Mongol Empire in 1300 would have had poll position for World Domination, as would the earlier Abbasid caliphate. If all it takes for World Domination is to steal other people’s stuff, what was it about Europe that was different?

    After all, China invented gunpowder. Why did Europe perfect it? Why did little England perfect the sailing Ship-of-the-Line? Why did the Divergence start and why there?

    Today I offer two books for interested readers that explain this. One of these could never be published today, and the author would never get tenure today. Fortunately (if that’s the right word) David Landes is safely dead and doesn’t have to worry about The Usual Suspects getting him denied tenure.

    Landes was a big deal in Economic History, authoring the section on the Industrial Revolution in the Cambridge Economic History. Late in his career, perhaps 30 years ago, he wrote The Wealth And Poverty of Nations, an economic history whose title was unashamedly stolen from Adam Smith. Landes insisted that social systems were key, and that some societies allowed progress towards a Great Divergence while other societies stifled attempts towards that progress.

    In other words, if your society doesn’t support the right efforts it doesn’t matter how much of other people’s wealth you steal; you’re going nowhere. We see this in the history of Spain which became fabulously wealthy by stealing New World wealth but squandered it, ending up at the bottom of European power rankings. You could say exactly the same thing about the Mongol empire, or the Caliphate.

    Landes’ arguments in the book are considered double-plus ungood by the woke crowd, so you might want to pick up a used copy from Amazon. The chapter on Argentina is particularly interesting in this age of President Milei. Interestingly, Milei was an Economist, and may have read Landes’ book.

    A second recommendation is less controversal with the woke crowd but is joined at the hip with the Great Divergence. The political cycle world wide has been the emergence of an empire, the collapse of the empire, and the rise of a successor empire. We see this in China, in India, in Mesoamerica.

    But not in Europe. Europe only had one great empire, Rome. When it fell, it was not replaced. Walter Scheidel wrote a book exploring why this unusual circumstance happened, Escape From Rome. Using Landes’ analytical framework, the Roman Empire did not encourage the types of behaviors that could have led to an Industrial Revolution, because those behaviors were seen by the Authorities as subversive to the state. But when Rome fell, there were unusual circumstances in Europe that prevented a new empire from rising in its place. Then competition between the poor emerging states set Europe on a very different path from the rest of the world. Basically, Europe escaped from Empire while the rest of the world didn’t.

    Read the whole thing.

  • If you want to list American cities least likely to flood, Las Vegas would seem a good bet (heh), but evidently an inch of rain is enough to turn it into Venice. 
  • “Hitler Mussolini wins Peruvian election.” “Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores has secured a narrow victory in Peru’s local elections, exit polls show. The candidate for the centre-left Ahora Nación party was elected mayor of Queropalca, a remote district in the Peruvian Andes.”
  • Washington State FAed, and now they’re finding out. “Columbia Bank moving top executives to Arizona, citing Washington taxes.”

    A major Pacific Northwest bank is shifting some of its top leadership to Arizona.

    First reported by The Puget Sound Business Journal, the Columbia Banking System is opening an executive office in the Scottsdale area.

    The office will open later this month.

    The exodus of Columbia Bank executives began with CEO Clint Stein, who sold his Auburn home (for $2.45 million in September) to relocate to Arizona permanently. According to The Puget Sound Business Journal, the company said new Washington taxes are costing it approximately $8 million a year, prompting the decision to move most executive roles to Arizona.

    Democrats love raising taxes more than life itself.

  • Project Farm tests dash cams.
  • You know how people always go “Where’s my flying car?” Looks like Elon Musk will have one for you in 2028. Usual Musk timeline caveats apply.
  • This is a movie I want to see (but probably not in theaters): Paging Hezbollah.
  • “Democrats Warn Trump Of Dangerous Precedent Set By Law Enforcement Raiding Homes Of Political Opponents.”
  • “Fringe Conspiracy Theorist Still Believes James Talarico Not Insane.”
  • “Scientists Hard At Work Making IPhone Weather App Even Less Accurate.”
  • Beautiful rescue floof starts bunny hopping.

  • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    North Koreans Abuse “Work At Home” Privileges

    Thursday, October 15th, 2026

    I can’t seem to land a remote tech job, but somehow a whole bunch of Korean spies were able to.

    Federal agents searched more than 40 Texas residences as part of an investigation into a North Korean cyber scheme that allowed foreign operatives to obtain remote jobs with American companies and generate revenue for the regime’s weapons program.

    The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas announced Tuesday that the FBI seized 187 laptops and electronic devices while conducting “Operation Lonestar Roundup,” including approximately 100 devices in North Texas.

    According to investigators, North Korean IT workers used stolen or fabricated American identities to secure remote positions with U.S. companies while concealing their actual locations.

    Maybe their fabricated identities have five years of AI experience. But how bad does your HR department have to be to not pick up on such a scheme?

    These arrangements, known as “laptop farms,” enabled North Korean workers to appear as though they were in the United States.

    The workers relied on U.S.-based facilitators who received company-issued laptops, configured the devices, and installed remote-access software that allowed operatives overseas to access American corporate systems.

    How bad is a company’s cybersecurity not to detect such intrusions?

    Federal authorities said these laptop farms intended to support North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction, such as ballistic missiles, intelligence, and nuclear programs.

    “This investigation is about far more than fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould. “It is about a hostile foreign regime infiltrating American companies through stolen identities and covert access points inside our own borders.”

    Investigators were also able to uncover fraudulent Google accounts and virtual private networks to hide the workers’ identities and facilitate the scheme.

    Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has identified the network of North Korean IT workers and their facilitators as “Famous Chollima.”

    FBI Dallas Special Agent in Charge R. Joseph Rothrock said each seized laptop potentially represents an American company that unknowingly hired a North Korean operative.

    Probably unrelated.

    “Every laptop farm we dismantle shuts down a revenue stream that the North Korean government relies on to fund weapons programs that threaten global stability,” Raybould added.

    So now, in addition to worrying if you’re going to be slacking off on a remote job, companies now have to worry if you’re a North Korean spy.

    Stupid jerk North Korean spies, ruining work from home for the rest of us…

    Feds FINALLY Crack Down On Microsoft’s H1-B Visa Abuse

    Saturday, October 10th, 2026

    For decades, everyone in tech has known that Microsoft was abusing the H1-B visa system to illegally import low-wage foreigners (mainly Indians) to do their programming rather than pay American programmers prevailing wages. The Trump Administration is finally doing something about it.

    President Donald Trump’s administration announced Thursday it was suspending Microsoft and several other firms from a program allowing foreign workers to apply for green cards, as it also lashed out at universities that bring international students to the U.S. on exchange programs.

    The announcement by Vice President JD Vance marks the latest swing from the Trump administration at employers and universities that welcome foreign students and workers into the country.

    Funny how the Trump Administration assigns tasks to Vance when they want to Get Stuff Done, while President Autopen assigned Kamala Harris to tasks where they didn’t want her to do anything.

    Supporters of the Republican president have long argued that various programs like H-1B visas — which Vance accused Microsoft of abusing — essentially empower American companies to recruit foreign workers for jobs that end up undercutting Americans. In the wide-ranging announcement, Vance and other top administration officials also called out universities over their use of J-1 visas for international students and information technology outsourcing firms.

    Snip.

    Vance says US workers are replaced with ‘foreign indentured servants’

    Vance said the program from which Microsoft is being suspended requires companies to advertise jobs in America before applying to the Department of Labor to show they need to give a foreign worker a green card because of a lack of American workers.

    “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.

    The tech employment market is also plagued with “ghost jobs,” where the same companies keep reposting same jobs over and over again without hiring anyone. I’m not sure if this is linked to H1-B visa abuse, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

    “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”

    Microsoft is No. 5 among U.S. employers when it comes to using H-1B visas, according data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Amazon is No. 1.

    Vance said Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.

    “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said in a White House news conference announcing the decision. “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers.”

    Vance said H-1B workers are effectively foreign indentured servants because if they lose their jobs, they have to leave the country, and they earn less than Americans in the same position.

    Snip.

    Ron Hira, a Howard University political science professor and longtime critic of the H-1B program, called the move against Microsoft “very significant.’’ Hira noted the White House last month issued a little-noticed executive order directing government agencies to “implement appropriate measures to protect American workers from abuse of the H-1B program and ensure that the program serves the national interest.’’

    “There are supposed to be protections for U.S. workers that say: If you hire an H-1B, you are promising that you are not adversely affecting similarly employed U.S. workers,’’ Hira said. “That’s never been enforced.’’

    Besides Microsoft, Vance said the government was similarly suspending Adobe and tech consulting firms Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini. The companies did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

    Cognizant is the company hiring more H1-B visa employees in Texas than Tesla, Oracle, Schwab, AT&T and HPE combined. Tata is a temporary/contract employment firm literally based in India. I don’t know about Adobe’s employment practices, but I do know they’re the ones who wanted unlimited use of everything you ever created with their tools. I’d say the Department of Labor is over the right targets.

    Microsoft has been an abusive company for a long, long time, and their reckoning is overdue.

    LinkSwarm For October 9, 2026

    Friday, October 9th, 2026

    Been an interesting day. While I wasn’t looking, a giant branch cracked and fell onto my driveway. I park in my garage, so nothing was harmed, and it was relatively easy to haul the branch to the other side of the driveway to trim down for trash.

    This week: Stephen Green takes a look at fraud in the Los Angeles Homeless Industrial Complex, Minnesota can’t go a week without more reports of Somali fraud and/or violence, Ukraine starts hitting Russian data centers, more of that illegal alien voting fraud that never happens, Ft. Hood jihadi shooter gets a firing squad, Vietnamese man arrested for selling “roof rabbit,” and an all-Lamborghini drag race.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Stephen Green: “You’ll Never Believe How L.A.’s ‘Ambitious Effort’ to Fix Homelessness Totally Failed.” Oh, I bet I can.

    Five years ago, a coalition of the usual lefty pressure organizations — public labor unions, progressive activist groups, and “housing advocates” — pushed for a citywide ballot initiative called United to House L.A. or ULA.

    Here’s the initiative that made the ballot in 2022: “Shall an ordinance be adopted to add a tax on the sale or transfer of real property valued at over $5 million to fund affordable housing and tenant assistance programs?”

    It passed, naturally, because voters like to feel good about themselves for doing their bit to promote “affordable housing and tenant assistance,” while feeling even better about not having to actually pay for any of it. Set a cap at “soak the rich level,” and you’ll be amazed at how altruistic people become with other people’s money.

    It was billed as a “mansion tax” to fund low-income housing.

    Over at the L.A. Times way back when, staff writer Benjamin Oreskes actually led with “an ambitious effort to address the homelessness crisis,” because the paper wasn’t at all pushing a lefty agenda. No, sir-ee.

    Meanwhile, RAND warned in 2022 that “the revenue raised by Measure ULA may disappoint,” pointing to “the city’s Affordable Housing Linkage Fee — a 2018 program that amounts to a tax on new market rate housing construction to fund affordable housing construction — suggested that it would raise $100 million per year. However, the actual revenue to date has been around one third of that amount or lower.”

    Supporters claimed the “mansion tax” would raise $900 million a year, or $2.7 billion over its first three years. “Instead,” the New York Post reported this weekend, ULA “brought in about $1.2 billion.” That’s less than half the expected revenues, nearly three years after passage.

    Snip.

    The Post also reported that ULA “blocked the building of 9,100 homes, wiped out 16,650 full-time construction jobs and cost $452 million in revenue.” So ULA might have raised $1.2 billion, but at the cost of nearly half a billion in lost income taxes, and more than 16,000 jobs.

    And that affordable housing? Still hasn’t happened: “The City has barely touched the cash, spending just $114 million as of May — less than 10% of the money raised,” the Post reported, but no new affordable housing units have been built.

    For Democrats, big pots of money that never get used for their professed purpose is the goal.

  • Also Stephen Green: “Look Inside the Luxury Tower Housing L.A.’s Homeless Bureaucracy.”

    A California-based independent journalist going by InnerRhythmMedia — think of him as Nick Shirley 2.0 — recently looked into the headquarters of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, and what he found looked more like a multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley firm than a joint city-county government project.

    Snip.

    As broken down by Wall Street Apes on Tuesday, LAHSA “is headquartered in a luxury high rise building where employees enjoy VIP amenities like a fitness center, rock climbing wall, an infrared sauna, a cold plunge, and a helipad.”

    And the pay? Oh my, the pay:

    • Chief Executive Officer, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, $491,908
    • Chief Financial Officer, Janine Trejo, $299,912
    • Deputy Chief, Systems, Nathaniel VerGow, $257,196
    • Chief of Staff, Rachel Johnson, $252,079
    • Chief Operating Officer, Tifara Monroe, $248,367

    More here.

  • Bad: Pneumonic plague outbreak from Russian biolab.
  • Good: There’s been a safe and effective vaccine against the plague since the 1930s. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “The Congressional Budget Office estimates roughly 1 million lawfully present immigrants will lose eligibility for Affordable Care Act subsidies by 2034, while about 100,000 could lose Medicare coverage. The Center for Medicare Advocacy says some Medicare terminations are expected Feb. 1, 2027.” Good. People shouldn’t move to America to go on welfare.

  • “FBI thwarts ‘Minnesota man’s’ jihadi plot to shoot up Mall of America.” “‘Minnesota man’ Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud was apparently looking to shoot up America’s most famous shopping mall.” Why, it’s almost like importing unassimilated Somalis into the American heartland has negative consequences…
  • Related: “Homecoming game in ritzy Minneapolis suburb evacuated after Somali gangs start fighting.”
  • The ATF admits that the ruling in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF applies to everyone.

    Effective October 9, 2026, ATF will no longer require individuals to seek ATF approval under the NFA before making or transferring short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, silencers, and “any other weapon[s]” as defined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(e). ATF will also no longer require such items to be registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. These policies apply uniformly to anyone otherwise subject to these requirements, not just to the plaintiffs.

    However, it’s not all sunshine, silencers and kittens: “The injunction does not disturb the NFA’s application to machineguns and destructive devices. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act maintained the $200 tax on such items. Consequently, all NFA provisions still apply to machineguns and destructive devices.” And state laws for the same items still apply. (Hat tip: Gun Owners of America.)

  • “Iran’s Economy ‘Deteriorating Rapidly,’ Regime’s National Security Chief Rezaei Admits. Iran’s currency hits new historic low, trading at 2.7 million rials to the dollar.”

    The Iranian economy is “rapidly deteriorating” under the weight of President Donald Trump’s Operation Economic Outcast, the regime’s national security chief Mohsen Rezaei said. The admission comes six weeks after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent launched a sweeping sanctions campaign to cut off the regime’s global commercial and financial access.

    Since President Donald Trump threatened Tehran with an “Economic D-Day” in August, the regime has struggled to break the U.S. naval blockade or find buyers for its oil. “This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY, and we need all of our Allies to stand with the United States of America to isolate, and defeat, the Iran threat,” he wrote on Truth Social in August. “These maniacs are on the ropes, and these HISTORIC MEASURES will cripple them and their ability to project terror worldwide.”

    Just months after boasting that Iran would ‘neutralize’ U.S. sanctions, Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad has been forced to leave the office. “Iran’s oil minister has resigned days after allegations that an intermediary trust selling Iranian oil abroad owed millions of dollars’ worth of export receipts to the state,” The Guardian reported on Monday. “Mohsen Paknejad’s departure comes as Iran grapples with a dire economic situation, including inflation running at 85%.”

    The Mullahs would rather the Iranian people starve their give up their dreams of nuclear weapons.

  • “Ukraine Attacks Omsk Oil Refinery (Biggest in Russia) 2,500km From Ukraine.”
  • “Ukraine Attacks Key Pumping Station Near Moscow.” “This is connected by product pipelines to the Ryazan and Moscow oil refineries, and then also connects the major airports of the Moscow region.”
  • “Big Drone Strike on Tsymbulova UAV Base in Oryol.”
  • “Huge Fire After Tanker is Hit Near Sochi!”
  • “Ukrainian Drones Destroy Data Centre in Ryazan! Hits Yandex.” AKA Russia’s Google. 
  • “Another Data Centre Hit By Ukraine (In Kaluga) + Satellite Imagery of Damaged Ryazan Data Centre.”
  • “Khanskaya Air Base Attacked By Drones.”
  • “Followup: “Su-34 and Su-35 Confirmed Destroyed At Khanskaya Air Base.”
  • Interesting development: Montenegro detained “Mikhail Zvinchuk, the founder of the pro-war Russian military-blogger network Rybar, along with his wife and three associates. Rybar often supports Russia’s war aims while reporting battlefield weaknesses that the Russian Defense Ministry downplays, including Ukrainian strikes on supply routes serving occupied Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea…Zvinchuk is under UK and EU sanctions and is on a U.S. wanted list tied to alleged election interference.”
  • Remember that Top Gear episodes where the lads tried their hands at driving 18-wheelers, and Jeremy Clarkson drove to the finish line blithely unaware his rig had caught fire? Well, thanks to a Ukrainian drone, a Russian truck driver just recreated that scene in Crimea. 
  • Important safety tip: Try not to transport a military helicopter on top of a pickup truck.
  • “Paxton Announces Hundreds of Child Predator Arrests.”

    More than 1,600 convictions have been secured by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Child Exploitation Unit as part of its efforts to combat online predators and child pornography.

    According to figures released Tuesday by the Office of the Attorney General, the unit has made 278 arrests for online solicitation of a minor, resulting in 214 convictions. Another 610 arrests for possession of child pornography have resulted in 1,410 convictions. Numerous cases remain pending.

    The figures were released as part of an update on the attorney general’s law enforcement operations.

    Snip.

    Paxton’s Human Trafficking Unit has separately made 373 arrests and secured 126 convictions, with several cases still pending.

    The attorney general also announced that the office’s Fugitive Apprehension Unit has now made 18,291 arrests since its inception, including 68 individuals on the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Top 10 Most Wanted List.

  • “‘Worst of the worst‘: Latest ICE roundup nabs pedophiles, animal abusers.”

    “Yesterday, the brave patriots of ICE arrested pedophiles, animal abusers, drug traffickers, and other public safety threats from our communities,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement. “Even while facing a more than 1,600% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line, ICE will not be deterred. Illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S. We will find you, arrest you, and remove you from our nation.”

    Topping the Wednesday roundup was Edis Canales-Montoya of Honduras, who was convicted of sexual conduct against a child.

    Gonzalo Sanchez of Mexico was convicted for possession of child pornography and driving under the influence.

    Carlos Arturo Zelaya-Argueta of El Salvador was convicted of sexual abuse of an animal and drug distribution.

    Manuel Gomez-Lopez of Guatemala was convicted for the manufacture/delivery of a controlled substance.

    Jesus Garcia-Serrano of Mexico was convicted for obstructing a criminal investigation and for unlawful possession of handguns.

  • That thing that never happens happened again. “Federal grand jury indicts 10 immigrants in Minnesota for illegally voting in US elections.”

    Today we are announcing that a federal grand jury returned an indictment against 10 foreign nationals who have committed unlawful voting and registration offenses in the state of Minnesota. In total, the grand jury’s indictments include 9 counts of illegal voting by an alien, and 9 counts of making a false claim of citizenship in order to register to vote.

    Charges include illegally voting in the general elections of 2022, 2024, and the primary elections of this year, of August 2026.

    The defendants that have been charged include foreign nationals from Brazil, Ghana, and Liberia.

  • Is James Talarico off the campaign trail because he “checked himself into a loony bin mental institution” after having a full-blown breakdown in late September? Only a rumor so far. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin at Instapundit.)
  • Turns out that black Michigan voters are not down with Abdul El-Sayed.

    MS NOW’s Morning Joe aired the second installment of its midterm series, “The Voter Files,” on Tuesday. Network contributor Elise Jordan spoke with a panel of black voters from Wayne County, Michigan, who had backed Rep. Haley Stevens in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. Their remarks did not bode well for Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

    The consensus was that the far-left El-Sayed has wrongly taken black support for granted. Panelists said he assumes that because black voters typically vote Democratic, they would set aside their reservations, and vote for him — no outreach required.

    One woman noted, “I think he’s taken advantage that we, as black people, are Democratic, and he thinks we’re gonna vote for him anyway, and I’m like, ‘No sir.’”

    “I’m gonna have to put uncommitted down on that little circle and move on,” she added. “If you’re going to Congress to represent me, I need you to talk about what’s going on in this community.”

    Another woman on the panel felt El-Sayed had missed opportunities to let black people know who he is. “We don’t understand him,” she said. “We don’t know him.”

    I wonder how much resentment is based on the unspoken assumption that he’ll be directing graft to Muslims rather than blacks…

  • “Hegseth Ends Civilian Tenured Jobs at Military Academies.”

    The Department of War (DOW) issued a press release September 29 announcing the latest change the Trump administration is making at U.S. service academies, including West Point and the Naval Academy. In order to keep the academies “laser-focused on lethality and readiness,” there will no longer be any civilians appointed to tenured positions at the academies.

    “This directly addresses the critical issues of academic stagnation and complacency that are often associated with tenure, and which threaten to dilute the academies’ primary focus on warfighting and tactical dominance,” the DOW press release argued.

    This will necessitate a major hiring adjustment, and I would not be at all surprised if the Trump administration ends up in court over this simply because judges seem to interfere with everything this administration does, particularly if it undercuts bloated bureaucracy

  • “Death by U.S. Army Firing Squad Approved for 2009 Fort Hood Gunman.” “Nidal Malik Hasan, a former U.S. Army psychiatrist, was convicted on 13 counts of premeditated murder in 2013 after he fired at soldiers and one civilian inside the Soldier Readiness Center, a medical facility, on the west side of the U.S. Army base on November 5, 2009. Hasan caused 13 deaths and injured 32 others before being shot and captured alive, although he was paralyzed from the waist down as a result.” I don’t think they’ll have any problem getting soldiers to volunteer for the firing squad.
  • Donald Trump speaks the unspeakable truth about French riots:

    President Donald Trump weighed in on France’s ongoing school protest crisis on Tuesday, arguing that the unrest reflected broader concerns about immigration and integration.

    In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!”

    Conservatives have only been warning about unassimilated Muslims in the French banlieues since the 1990s…

  • “Quebec Elects Separatists Vowing To Break From Canada.” Well, that will come in handy 30 years or so hence to resettle French natives fleeing the new Paris Caliphate…
  • TSMC planning to build a fab in Texas? This is speculative and preliminary, and Musk has already denied TSMC will help run Terafab, but the move makes a lot of economic sense for both parties. Plus fabs employ a whole lot more people than data centers.
  • “Vietnamese men charged with stealing 2,700 cats to sell for meat.”

  • China’s national soccer team is so bad it just lost 0-5 to a country that doesn’t even exist.
  • Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner interview William Shatner. Not always geared to my interests, but there are some nuggets. And holy crap, Shatner looks great for someone who’s 95.
  • The Honest Trailer for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
  • Dwight sent over this story about a formerly pregnant tranny “man” who got mag-dumped by his inlaws (“who took turns shooting him”), but trying to make sense of it just made my brain hurt.
  • Lambo vs Lambo vs. Lambo vs. Lambo vs. Lambo vs. Lambo. 
  • “Democrats Blame Cuts In USAID For Slowing Communist Takeover Of The West.”
  • “Palestinians Finally Granted Own Country.”

  • “Nation’s College Students Worried Cornell Incident Will Ruin Ketamine-Fueled Campus Orgies For Everyone Else.”
  • “Experts Theorize Possible Connection Between TikTokers Celebrating Women Killing Their Children And More Women Killing Their Children.”
  • “Ariana Grande Lands Seasonal Gig As Halloween Lawn Skeleton.”
  • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Trump Tightens SNAP Requirements As Nick Shirley Demonstrates EBT Fraud

    Wednesday, October 7th, 2026

    Sometimes two stories come out demonstrating different aspects of the same issue. First President Trump announced stricter SNAP eligibility requirements.

    Families applying for food assistance through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will, beginning Thursday, face changes to payments, eligibility requirements and how the benefits are administered.

    Most families will initially see a slight bump in their monthly payments to support grocery purchases from a cost-of-living adjustment, but in the coming months, households will face stricter eligibility requirements, meaning fewer people will receive the benefits, ABC News reported.

    Under new work requirements imposed by the “The Big Beautiful Bill Act,” able-bodied adults ages 18 to 64 who don’t have dependents will be required to work. Previously, the age limit was 54. Families with children age 14 or older are no longer exempt from the work requirements.

    The “The Big Beautiful Bill Act” also requires states to pay for a larger share of SNAP administrative costs, and states with SNAP recipient error rates above 6% will be required to fund a portion of the benefits themselves.

    Second, Nick Shirley demonstrates just how easy it is to commit EBT card (Electronic Benefits Transfer, the primary means by which welfare recipients receive and spend SNAP benefits) fraud.

  • “Food stamp fraud. A type of fraud that steals from the poor and hungry and has become one of the easiest fraud schemes in America.”
  • “How many people I’ve seen sell food stamps to get their hair done, nails done, their toes done, buy an outfit to go to the club, drugs. A lot.”
  • “More than 42 million Americans receive food stamps and over 100 billion dollars from your taxes fund this program.”
  • “With over 250,000 stores accepting food stamps, it’s become one of the easiest programs to defraud. And it’s actually pretty simple. Each month, the government funds people’s food stamp cards with a certain amount of money, and then people will trade the money on the card at a discounted price.” A guy with $306 on his EBT card offers to sell it for $120 cash.
  • “The food stamp card is essentially just like an ATM for a lot of these homeless people here inside of Seattle.”
  • “There’s a a foreign person usually and they’ll take the money to buy food for cheaper.” “So a foreigner will come in and offer somebody cash for the EBT.” Evidently committing Food Stamp fraud has become another of those jobs Americans won’t do.
  • EBT cards are so ubiquitous you can find them lying on the ground in homeless encampments. “Some of these folks who use these cards, they’re trying to sell them or trade them and they just forget about them, so they just throw them. So, you have hundreds of dollars on the streets, if not thousands of dollars worth of food stamp cards, and you can find them in almost any encampment.” Maybe here’s another clue as to why the left loves homeless encampments: They help facilitate EBT fraud, which offers another chance for the Homeless Industrial Complex to cash in.
  • “So, people can buy these for cash and then that drug addict will then actually have the money to buy his drugs.” “Yeah. And that’s the problem, right? You can’t buy drugs with food stamp cards. So, these have to be sold for pennies on the dollar. They’ll take whatever cash and they’ll immediately go to their dealer, who’s on pretty much every single corner here.” Is fentanyl really only 50¢ on the streets of Seattle? No wonder heroin use is declining.
  • There are several minutes of negotiating with various Seattle street people. Everyone seems aware of the scam.
  • They go to a Asian-owned store where they try to run a charge of $120 for a can of spam and a plate of prepared sushi. The woman who leads them there seems to be from Vietnam.
  • The video ends with Shirley’s team ending up in a brawl with a bunch of Seattle street people. “Nick, if I didn’t see you on the street here running right now, I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t know where you would have gone. You’re being targeted right now. Everyone’s saying Nick Shirley’s here. Nick Shirley’s here.”

    Food Stamp fraud is evidently an industry, and the people running it don’t like it being threatened by any nosy citizen journalists…

    Proposition I: Audit Austin

    Monday, October 5th, 2026

    Another election year means another batch of propositions for Austin citizens to vote on. Most are the usual mix of bonds and bad ideas, but Save Austin Now has managed to get Proposition I, a proposal to perform regular audits of the city budget, on the ballot.

    One year after defeating a massive tax hike proposal, Austin voters will decide this November whether to lock in regular audits of city finances through a charter initiative that is facing opposition from a government employees’ union.

    Proposition I resulted from a citizen petition organized by the Save Austin Now PAC, a group that successfully worked to defeat a proposed 20 percent tax rate hike in 2025. This year, the PAC’s petition effort collected more than 20,000 signatures to place the proposed “Independent Affordability & Efficiency Initiative” (IAEI) on the ballot to mandate hiring an independent and experienced audit firm through a competitive bid process.

    Under the measure, the selected auditing agency would analyze the spending, performance, and outcomes of all city departments and contractors to identify opportunities to streamline and optimize staffing and management structure and identify fraud, waste, abuse, and conflicts of interest.

    The IAEI analysis would also include an examination of how city policy, such as tax rates, affects resident affordability.

    Attorney and former Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire, who drafted the charter amendment, told The Texan that voters sent a message to the city council last year in rejecting the property tax increase, but that Proposition I “would make the message permanent.”

    “That message is ‘enough,’ and that their taxes are too high,” he said.

    Aleshire noted that the ballot initiative differs from an ordinance approved by the city council in February 2026.

    “The ordinance can be repealed the day after the election by the Austin City Council,” he said. “But the charter amendment is basically the people telling the city council that they must have this new audit process, and therefore it’s also enforceable by the voters, and it cannot be changed without another vote of the public.”

    Under the charter amendment, the auditor must benchmark the cost of city government to measures of resident affordability, and audits must be completed every five years and within one year of any future tax rate increase elections.

    While the city is not required to publish documentation supporting audits under its new ordinance, Aleshire also pointed out that the charter amendment would make all drafts and supporting materials available to the public.

    The selected contractor would also have to identify annual and multi-year savings that exceed the cost of its own work.

    Austin Mayor Kirk Watson has called the charter amendment a “political move” and argued that the mandate to identify the savings presents a conflict of interest for the auditing firm.

    The charter amendment has also drawn opposition from the local chapter of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The union’s president, Brydan Summers, said in a statement that the proposition is “just the latest attempt from Save Austin Now to force its right-wing agenda on our city.”

    Of course Democrats and unions hate the idea of audits, because that would show just how deep they’ve shoved their hands into the cookie jar:

  • Austin appears to use homeless program “consultants” as a conduit to donate money to Democrats.
  • That is, when they’re not using it to launder money into their own pockets.
  • Remember the entire “Reimaging Austin Police” lunacy? The entire purpose of that charade was to take money out of the hands of law enforcement and put it into the hands of radical leftwing organizations, almost all of which just happened to have members on the “reimaging” task force.
  • No wonder they don’t want audits. For every situation where leftwing activists are sticking their snouts into that giant trough of taxpayer money we’ve caught, there are probably dozens of instances we haven’t. So expect every social justice Democrat at every level of Austin government, and every left-leaning NGO in the city, to come out full bore to defeat Proposition I at all costs.

    LinkSwarm For October 2, 2026

    Friday, October 2nd, 2026

    A reminder not to get black-pilled, another Supreme Court win for deporting illegal alien felons, San Francisco’s government offers pedos a veritable buffet, Rockefeller money is going to the ChiComs, and another deeply technical video on semiconductor processes you won’t click on.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Kurt Schlichter reminds you not to get blackpilled.

    Yes, I want to believe, but there’s evidence supporting hope. There’s evidence supporting the idea that the polls are so substantially flawed that they do not accurately reflect what’s going to happen. Again, the caveat – this could be delusion. We could be seeing what we want to see. But then, what we’re seeing is there. There is evidence supporting what we want to happen, evidence worth considering.

    We’re seeing how polls have been missing big lately. Look at Abdul El-Sayed. He was supposed to win that Michigan primary in a walk. We’re talking five, 10, 15 points, according to the primary polls. And yet he barely squeaked past that squeaky woman he was competing with. We’ve seen lots of other polls that assured us of a Democrat victory. Just ask President Harris about that.

    If you’ve been around a while, you know that the polls always favor the Democrats. You almost never see a Democrat surprise us by exceeding his polling against a Republican. You just don’t. So, there’s that. And of course, there’s an interest in driving down Republican enthusiasm by telling people they can’t win.

    Then there’s the gut vibe. Don’t completely disregard that. In Texas, you must believe the Texans are going to support a blasphemous, anti-meat, anti-gun, anti-white, woke weirdo with a thing for trans kids. Does that sound like Texas to you? It sure doesn’t sound like Texas to me, and I’m in Texas. I’ve talked to a lot of Texan conservatives. Not one thinks this guy is going to win. Now, they agree it could theoretically happen, but they don’t think it’s going to. Ken Paxton has won three times in statewide races, and he’s done a lot of great conservative things. Are Texans really going to choose a bizarre homunculus to spend six years in Washington, D.C., voting like Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) in their name? It just doesn’t fit. It’s weird. That’s not saying it couldn’t happen – there are lots of communists here along with other weirdos, losers, and mutations who would be thrilled to have this geebo as a Lone Star senator. But it just doesn’t feel like something that’s going to happen.

    Moreover, we’ve been told a lot of conservatives are going to sit this out. The bots on X are certainly pushing that coordinated message, as the semi-coherent comments on my Monday column about quitters demonstrate. Yes, there are probably some Republicans who are going to sit out this midterm, but I haven’t met any of them personally. Maybe you have. I just don’t think there are a lot of them, especially in light of how appalling the Democrats are. It doesn’t make sense, at least to people who aren’t idiots who blame everything on Epstein conspiracies and the Jews and blah blah blah, to be mad at Trump and the Republicans for not being conservative enough and showing them what-for by allowing the election of communists. As risky as it is, I’m not going all-in on the assumption that people are that stupid.

    Read the whole thing, and encourage all your sane friends to show up at the polls in November.

  • “Fauci diary reveals alarm that U.S. had aerosolized Ebola virus. Umm, isn’t this a violation of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction?

    Dr. Anthony Fauci privately sounded the alarm when he learned the U.S. Army had conducted an experiment a decade ago that aerosolized the lethal Ebola virus, which is not normally transmitted by air, and then shared the results publicly amid an ongoing outbreak in Africa, according to diary entries obtained by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul.

    The then-top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease was particularly concerned in 2016 that the Army medical research arm’s experiment seemed to show that exposure to aerosolized Ebola caused more damaging effects in subjects that had been vaccinated. This was almost four years before he championed shutting down the U.S. economy and social life over the COVID-19 virus outbreak.

    Fauci wrote he believed such research should be kept secret, preferably classified, so that it didn’t undermine public confidence in vaccination in the African countries suffering an outbreak of the virus.

    “What idiots those guys at USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] are,” Fauci wrote in a March 2016 diary entry. “This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place.”

    Why yes, “undermining public confidence in vaccination” is a far bigger concern than the fact that the U.S. Army under Obama was committing an actual war crime.

  • “San Francisco’s Frat Houses for Pedophiles. California houses sex offenders right next to schools—on the taxpayers’ dime.”

    It’s Tuesday morning at Little Learners Daycare in downtown San Francisco. Teacher Wendy herds bright-eyed toddlers, amped up after playtime in the courtyard, back inside. They’re laughing and swatting at each other playfully, oblivious to the pack of pedophiles lurking nearby.

    Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex offenders live at 111 Taylor Street. Wendy knew that the Tenderloin, where she operates her Mandarin-immersion daycare, was dangerous. It’s a hotbed for illegal drug activity and homelessness. But she didn’t realize that sex offenders live so close to her daycare—or that taxpayers fund their housing.

    Pedophiles, illegal aliens; the only people Democrats don’t like paying for housing for is law-abiding American citizens.

    According to this City Journal investigation, more than 25 percent of sex offenders in San Francisco with addresses in the Megan’s Law database live in taxpayer-subsidized buildings. Many live near a park, school, or daycare, or reside in a neighborhood with a high concentration of children. They do all of this despite statewide efforts to ban concentrating pedophiles so close to children. Instead of listening to California voters, San Francisco has become a taxpayer-funded dumping ground for sex criminals.

    The Taylor Street Center is one of San Francisco’s most heavily populated sex-offender residences. Located in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street houses at least 31 registered sex offenders. The taxpayer-funded California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons contract the private GEO Group to run the facility.

    The reentry complex can house 240 people. It hosts specialized programs for residents like “cultural diversity education,” “gender-responsive groups,” and a “weekly meditation group.” The facility sits just 400 feet from a daycare center, 1,000 feet from a fourth-to-eighth-grade school, and five blocks away from a preschool.

    Any sex offender housed in the Tenderloin is bound to encounter children. Along with having a high concentration of immigrant and low-income households, the neighborhood also has the highest concentration of kids in the entire city.

    I’m sure the sex offenders call that “the buffet.”

  • “Trump Cancels $810M for Illegal Immigrants, Race-Based Programs.”

    President Trump invoked a rare and legally contested power Friday to cancel $810 million in congressionally approved spending, targeting programs for illegal immigrants and a slate of federal initiatives explicitly organized around race and DEI.

    The request hits 11 funding pools at seven departments and agencies. It also landed with just five days left in the fiscal year. That’s the point of the disputed “pocket rescission” maneuver: the money runs out before Congress gets its normal 45 days to consider the cuts.

    The biggest piece is $567 million at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for services to refugees, asylees, unaccompanied minors, and other non-citizens.

    The White House called them “pro-illegal immigration programs” and said the money is no longer needed because illegal border crossings have fallen sharply.

    But immigration spending was only part of the package.

    Several of the rescissions hit programs explicitly organized around race or ethnicity.

    The administration wants to rescind $10 million from the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, which helps minority-owned businesses. The White House pointed to a 2024 federal court ruling that found the agency’s presumption of social disadvantage based on race or ethnicity unconstitutional.

    Another $5 million would come from HHS’s Office of Minority Health.

    The White House highlighted grants from that office addressing racial trauma among black youth, health disparities among black and Latino youth, a George Washington University fellowship promoting health equity and DEI, and a $1.5 million project addressing the effects of redlining and structural racism.

    HUD housing counseling takes a much larger hit, with $56 million targeted.

    The administration said the program had funded groups including UnidosUS, the National Urban League, and Housing Action Illinois, criticizing their work on structural racism, racial justice, and other DEI priorities.

    Then there is the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, slated to lose $15 million.

    The office’s mission included “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions” and restoring racial stability. The Trump administration shut it down earlier this year and now accuses the office of promoting critical race theory and gender ideology rather than carrying out that mission.

    The package goes beyond those programs.

    The administration identified $28 million in HHS research funding it wants canceled, pointing to grants involving transgender health care, racial disparities, and a $50,000 project to develop a research agenda addressing racism in emergency medicine. Another $70 million would be pulled from international education programs, including programs the White House said had funded research involving queer and transgender issues abroad.

    Other cuts include $25 million for migrant student programs, $25 million across two DHS programs providing services or legal assistance to non-citizens, and $9 million for a Treasury program providing debt relief to foreign countries in exchange for conservation commitments.

    Now we need to hand out pink slips to the people who were administering these programs.

  • “Ilsky Oil Refinery in Krasnodar Hit By Drones: Big Damage.”
  • Follow-up: “Satellite Imagery Shows Huge Damage to Azov Mechanical Plant.”
  • “Big Missile/Jet Drone Strike on Azov Mechanical Plant, Rostov: Makes Parts for Missiles.”
  • “L-39 Trainer Destroyed, Three Fast Patrol Boats Hit!” Plus some radar equipment hit.
  • “Over 40 Destroyed Russian Logistics Vehicles On One Stretch of Road in Southern Ukraine.”
  • Russian chemical explosives plant explodes. Possibly just the usual Russian incompetence.
  • Speaking of Russian incompetence: “Tu-95 Bear Crashes in Amur, Russia!” That’s in the Russian far east, so probably not taken out by Ukraine.
  • Turnabout is fair play: Ukraine uses its own turtle tanks to attack Russian positions.
  • Long overdue: “Education Dept. Officially Removes Biden’s Title IX Gender Identity Rules. In other words, the department is sticking to the literal interpretation of Title IX: sex-based discrimination.”

    The Education Department has officially rescinded the Biden Administration’s Title IX interpretation that extended protections to students based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

    In other words, the department is sticking to Title IX’s literal meaning: sex-based discrimination.

    “Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.”

    Honestly, nothing changes because the department has been enforcing reality since January 2025: Title IX is based on sex. It’s not based on your sexual orientation or gender identity.

  • It looks like trying to gay the kids has backfired.

    Somehow, the people who tell us that they were “born this way” and that “sexuality is a spectrum” are now returning to normal. It’s almost like the whole “acceptance” movement was just a social contagion that spread because teens like being rebellious!

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Supreme Court Allows Rapid Third-Country Deportations to Continue.”

    The Supreme Court majority (6-3) has granted the DOJ request to put on hold a Boston-based US District Judge ruling that DHS policy to remove illegal aliens to so-called third countries is unlawful. The process of rapid deportation will continue while the matter is called before the Supreme Court for oral arguments in December (ruling in ’27).

    The Usual Suspects opposed deporting the Democrat Party’s precious illegal alien felons.

  • “Jack Smith Collected Thousands of Trump Donors’ Financial Info as Part of Election Probe.”

    Former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed at least 4,782 political donations to President Donald Trump from Americans across the country between September 2019 and August 2023, Senator Chuck Grassley revealed during a Tuesday hearing featuring the former special counsel.

    The checks — which Smith’s team acquired as part of their election case against Trump, dubbed “Arctic Frost” — contained donors’ personal information, including their home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures. Some of the subpoenaed donations were for as little as $1. Grassley revealed the evidence while questioning Smith during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing and followed up with a press release containing further details.

    During former President Joe Biden’s administration, Smith brought two cases against Trump: The first accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and the second involved him keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Smith resigned from his position nine days before Trump was sworn in as president again; both cases against Trump have been dismissed.

    As part of the FBI’s investigation into the 2020 election, agents accessed toll records, which show who a given individual spoke with on the phone but not the contents of their calls, for 16 members of Congress. He also subpoenaed records from 87 Trump White House phones, which captured records from calls between government sources and dozen of news outlets.

    The political donations Grassley described were obtained as part of Smith’s investigation, which focused on whether Trump defrauded donors by raising money under the false pretext that the resulting donations would help Trump’s team overturn the results of the 2020 election.

    All the easier to compile an enemies list should Democrats retake power…

  • “Rockefeller Brothers Fund Sent Nearly $32 Million to China-Based Nonprofits, Watchdog Finds. ‘Dangerous partnership with Communist China.'”

    The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a $1.4 billion U.S.-based charity with funding from the Rockefeller family and other donors, has forged a “dangerous partnership with Communist China” and is pouring millions of dollars into China-based nonprofits that are advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy goals.

    That’s one of the findings in a new report, “The Rockefeller Network: How the Rockefeller Family Turned Their Oil Fortune into Extreme Climate Activism,” out today from Americans for Public Trust, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative watchdog organization. The report, an advance copy of which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, outlines how the billion-dollar fortune of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., who died in 1937, is being used “to quietly bankroll numerous radical and leftist projects.”

    Snip.

    “An alarming amount—well into the millions—has found its way directly into the coffers of entities that are either official vestiges of the Chinese government, or directly and irrefutably administered by the CCP and its representatives,” the report says. “And many of these entities, while operating under the guise of ‘green’ and environmental research, are, instead, using these funds to help buttress China’s foreign influence programs around the globe, especially the CCP’s infamous ‘Belt and Road Initiative.'”

    Among the grants singled out in the report as most problematic:

    — $400,000 between 2020 and 2024 to the Foreign Environment Cooperation Center, “a division of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.”

    — Nearly $1.5 million to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, whose “direct ties to the Chinese government are undeniable.”

    — Nearly $200,000 to Tsinghua University, which announced in 2024 that the school’s office of the president had merged with the Chinese Communist Party to “form a new Party Committee Office that would run the school.”

    Groups that fund the ChiComs should have their non-profit status revoked and their assets seized.

  • “New York Democrat says the quiet part out loud: “My biggest goal … is I want to legalize 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 million people in our country.”

    Democrats are always saying the quiet part out loud nowadays.

    They aren’t even trying to hide their radical plans to totally replace America’s voters, workers, and people with a cheap labor underclass that disproportionately votes Democrat.

    [ U.S. Representative] Democrat Tom Suozzi says his biggest goal in politics is mass amnesty for criminal illegals:

    “My biggest goal of what I want to accomplish in politics right now is I want to legalize 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 million people in our country.”

    Amnesty was always the end goal for the illegal alien importation.

  • Obvious: “UK Whistleblower: 99 percent of Asylum Claims Are Fake.”

    Only one in 100 asylum claims are genuine, according to a whistleblower who has revealed widespread fraud and dysfunction in the system.

    The Home Office official, who has worked for years as a decision-maker on asylum and has assessed thousands of claims, said asylum seekers from certain countries use the “same script” in what he and colleagues describe as “package claims”.

    He said he had encountered a large number of Iraqi Kurds claiming asylum who said they had been in a relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan region. The official said it had become a “running joke” among colleagues that the number of Iraqi Kurds who said they were involved with the daughter was in the “hundreds”.

    He also said that “hundreds” of claims from Pakistanis were based on the assertion that they were in fear of their lives in their home country because of their gay relationship with the same man who had provided letters supporting their claims.

    The source also disclosed suspicions about large numbers of Bangladeshi claimants purporting to be dissidents of the former governing party, which is now banned, even though they were unable to provide basic information about the group.

  • “The Netherlands Also Has Islamic Grooming Gangs“; Dutch MP Warns After 18-Year-Old Girl Raped By 10 Men.”

    An 18-year-old woman has been gang raped and beaten by up to ten different men, many of them with a Syrian background, in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Although the rape occurred in May 2025, the suspects are only now being arrested. In response to the rape, political leader Geert Wilders wrote that the Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs and called for all the perpetrators to be removed from the country along with their families.

    Six suspects have now been arrested, aged 20 to 23. During the incident, the girl, who lived in a residential group home, was driven to two different parking lots and raped by several men, some of whom filmed the assault and shared it on Snapchat. Police say the woman was humiliated and beaten.

    And somehow the leaders of UK’s Labour Party say “Yes, we need more of that.”

  • “Passengers subdue Arab co-pilot who tried to hijack flight to Israel.”

    A plane leaving Dubai and heading towards Tel Aviv almost saw a tragic end as the co-pilot of the plane turned hijacker mid-flight and attempted to take control and crash the plane….

    The co-pilot, an Omani national, stabbed the pilot multiple times in an attempt to kill him and hijack the flight. The co-pilot had worked for FlyDubai for around a year.

    The injured pilot was able to transmit a radio warning, Israel scrambled fighter jets, and the passengers and crew were able to subdue the attacker in midair.

    The plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia to sort the entire mess out.

    Be prepared to fight for your life on a moment’s notice, because you might have to.

  • More long overdue. “Trump expands H-1B visa crackdown, will scrutinize layoffs.”

    The Trump administration on Thursday announced an executive order expanding the ongoing crackdown against H-1B visa abuse.

    The H-1B is a visa program designed to allow companies to bring in high-skilled workers when no qualified Americans are available. But the program has faced considerable scrutiny in recent years, due to widespread fraud. Critics have argued that major employers also use it as a way to undercut American wages.

    Trump’s Thursday order reaffirms the $100,000 application fee he imposed last year, but now mandates inter-agency coordination to consider an employers’s recent or planned layoffs when applying for H-1B visas.

    “Our message to corporate America is simple: We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor,” Vice President JD Vance said.

  • “ICE Arrests 121 During Summer Enforcement Initiative Near Dallas. The operation included the arrests of two alleged Tren de Aragua members.”

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 121 individuals during a summer enforcement initiative around Lake Lewisville in Dallas.

    The operation, led by ICE’s Dallas field office, began June 27 and concluded over Labor Day weekend. It involved coordination with state and federal agencies, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and focused on identifying individuals unlawfully present in the country, assisting with lake-related investigations, and allowing local officers to devote more resources to boating safety enforcement.

    According to ICE’s Friday release, individuals arrested during the initiative had criminal histories involving offenses such as assault, family violence, theft, burglary, sexual assault of a child, driving while intoxicated, and boating while intoxicated.

    Among those arrested were two men ICE identified as members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization designated by the U.S. State Department as both a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist group.

    Willian Josue Ordonez Vasquez, 24, a Venezuelan national, and Edwin Josue Cabrera-Zelaya, 22, a Honduran national, were under investigation by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for allegedly operating an illegal livery business on Lake Lewisville.

    I must say that I’ve never run into “illegal livery business” before, but it seems to involve not complying with Texas regulations on powered boat rental.

  • Man bites dog: “Too extreme for Newsom? California sanctuary bill for abortion, transgender procedures vetoed.”

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom used his veto pen to make out-of-state prosecutions theoretically possible for both “reproductive health care services” and “gender affirming health care services.”

    The term-limited Democrat with presidential ambitions, who recently said he won’t run if fellow Californian and former Democratic nominee Kamala Harris enters the 2028 presidential race, vetoed legislation (AB 2164) to codify an extradition ban for “legally protected health care activity” in California, claiming it infringed executive authority.

    Ignore the blather about Harris, Governor Hairgel is obviously running.

  • AI 1, Harvard 0.

    Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.

    Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.

    And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.

    They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.

    One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.

    The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.

    The AI didn’t just win. It embarrassed the institution.

    Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.

    They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.

    And they did it in less time.

    Let that sink in.

    A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.

    Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.

    This study just proved both of those moats are gone.

    When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.

    Yeah, but can AI forge friendships with the spawn of rich people, the primary purpose of so many attending the Ivy League? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Taxpayer Philanthropy: Detroit pastor paid $540K for part-time work.”

    A Detroit pastor who last year admonished a parishioner for her inadequate church donation of $1,235 was paid a salary of $538,955 that year by a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he leads that is separate from the church, according to federal records.

    That salary for Marvin Winans Sr. — the pastor of Perfecting Church and a Grammy-winning gospel singer — accounted for about 61% of what the nonprofit spent toward its stated mission of “community development,” its recent report to the Internal Revenue Service shows.

    His role as president for the nonprofit — Perfecting Community Development Corporation — is a half-time job, the report says, which means he was paid about $518 per hour.

    Nice work if you can get it.

    Winans’ salary has increased substantially in recent years and coincided with a $500,000 government grant the state awarded the nonprofit. Grant application guidance indicates the award was funded with federal pandemic relief money.

    Of course it was.

    Seems like Pastor Winans was far more concerned with fat stacks than flocks…

  • Another terror plot thwarted. “Suspect Arrested for Alleged Thwarted Capitol Attack Now in Federal Custody. Benny Caldera, Jr. was released from the Bexar County Jail into federal custody.”

    A man was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Texas State Capitol in Austin early in the morning of Wednesday, September 30.

    The attack was allegedly set to occur on October 1.

    Forty-year-old Benny Caldera, Jr., of Converse, was arrested by a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) SWAT team, according to reporting by NBC DFW.

    He was booked into the Bexar County Jail and charged with making a terroristic threat against a public servant, a third degree felony, and was held on a $75,000 bond. It was not immediately clear if Caldera has a lawyer or how he plans to plead in response to the charge.

    According to an arrest warrant affidavit, DPS was told by a friend of Caldera’s that he “had made verbal threats to assault the Texas State Capitol Building.” He is alleged to have said “I am going to the Capitol and I am going to shoot it up.”

    Arrest documents also allege that Caldera’s motive was anger at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel political lobbying group, of which he reportedly said “these people have to be exterminated.”

    Of course. Always The Joooooos!

    Possibly just a dumbass shooting off his mouth. But lots of similar dumbasses have racked up kill counts in recent decades.

  • Make New Mexico Texas again? “Texas House Weighs Annexation of New Mexican Counties. The unlikely proposal could benefit the Permian Basin, one state representative claimed.” The chances of New Mexico agreeing without receiving something ridiculous in return (like El Paso) are virtually zero.
  • “‘Y’all Street’ Welcomes Financial Giant Morgan Stanley to Dallas. The city of Dallas and the state of Texas both offered the company incentives for the new hub.”

    Gov. Greg Abbott announced the company’s decision, saying it is a $684 million capital investment that could create 3,800 jobs. The governor also announced that a Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) grant totaling $43,849,500, paired with a Veteran Created Job Bonus of $40,000, was offered to the company.

    [Insert usual disapproval of TEF subsidies here.]

  • “Elon Musk Says The Boring Company Is Working on San Antonio-Austin Hyperloop.” “Working on” is a slippery concept, and it could just mean some preliminary feasibility studies. “Experts say Hyperloop projects face significant engineering and construction challenges.” You don’t say. Though I bet there’s a better chance of it being built than another proposed Austin to San Antonio high speed rail boondoggle.
  • “Paramount Warner Bros. Merger GREENLIT! Mark Ruffalo Most Affected!”
  • Tik Tok makes you stupid.
  • ASML wants larger EUV masks to support their High Numerical Aperture EUV stepper. “TSMC and ASML recently announced that the Taiwanese fab will adopt High-NA EUV for high volume manufacturer in 2030. In order to make this economical, the two giants will push the industry to adopt larger 6 in x 12in rectangular photo masks.” This is going to be a challenge for the entire industry ecosystem.
  • You know who else liked horses?
  • Retro-future noir. With aliens. Directed by Brad Bird. Mood: Cautious optimism.
  • BeardMeatsFood demolishes a 7 Deadly Sins challenge…and then promptly orders two more burgers and dessert. (OK, technically four more burgers, but it looks like he gave two to the cameraman.)
  • I just sent out my latest Lame Excuse Books catalog of SF/F/H books. Drop me a line if you’d like to receive a copy.
  • “Judge Rules That Trump Must Allow White House Access To Assassins.”
  • “Feminist Mad That The Men She Hates Won’t Date Her.” “I don’t get it. I’m aggressive, shrill, angry, and I talk online all the time about how much I hate men. Why won’t any of them ask me out?”
  • I would buy this so hard: “Mattel Confirms Hanukkah Barbie Comes Complete With Space Laser.”
  • A happy reunion:

  • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    LinkSwarm For September 25, 2026

    Friday, September 25th, 2026

    The Supreme Court green-lights verifying American citizenship for voting, fraud, fraud, and more fraud, Trump gets Greenland without having to buy it, Cruz looks at EPIC City terrorism ties, the Clancy holdout juror speaks, some horrifying child abuse cases, and completely different horrifying murder house, and a surprising amount of Norm Macdonald.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Supreme Court Clears Trump Admin To Use Voter Citizenship Verification.”

    The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 said the Trump administration can use an updated immigration database to verify the citizenship of voters.

    A majority of justices agreed to stay pending the outcome of an appeal of a June order from a federal judge that barred the use of a revamped database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.

    U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had found that federal officials were violating the privacy rights of American citizens by disclosing the citizenship status and Social Security numbers, among other data, in the restructured database. She vacated the 2025 update, which connected Social Security information to the system.

    A federal appeals court later upheld the decision.

    Trump administration officials then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing in a Sept. 8 brief that the order “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by states to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”

    Six justices sided with the administration. In a per curiam opinion, they said that claims from the organizations that sued over the updated database “likely lack merit,” including the allegation that federal officials are violating federal laws, because Congress authorized the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive citizenship information and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration, in a 1996 statute called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

    The majority also said that keeping in place the prohibition “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies.”

    States regularly use the system. Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden recently said the state in the fall of 2025 ran the names of its 18 million registered voters through the database and identified 2,724 people who may be noncitizens.

    Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

  • “USDA Targets 170 NYC Retailers in SNAP Fraud Sweep. ‘SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,’ White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said.”

    The Trump administration has stopped more than $5.8 billion in SNAP fraud since taking office, and its latest sweep just hit New York City, where hundreds of undercover investigations led to enforcement action against 170 retailers across all five boroughs.

    The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced “Operation SNAP Back” on Friday as part of a broader push against retailer fraud in the nearly $100 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

    “This is just the latest action in the Trump Administration’s fight against fraud. The message is clear, if you accept any portion of an annual $100 billion taxpayer program, you must follow the rules or face the consequences,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said. “We owe it to every American taxpayer to safeguard their hard-earned dollars, and these latest enforcement actions are just a small part of the Food and Nutrition Administration’s efforts to remove criminals and bad actors from food stamps.”

    The cases involve SNAP trafficking, where benefits are exchanged for cash, along with retailers accused of allowing benefits to be used for alcohol and other ineligible non-food items. USDA says penalties can range from temporary suspension to permanent disqualification and monetary fines. Several cases were also referred to the USDA Office of Inspector General for possible criminal investigation and prosecution.

    Investigators used undercover purchases at stores suspected of violating SNAP rules. Some retailers were caught exchanging benefits for cash, while others allegedly processed transactions for prohibited products.

    “SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,” White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said. “And thanks to Secretary Rollins, such waste and abuse will stop.”

  • Funny how this keeps happening: “Reporter finds no kids at Somali-run daycares in Seattle.”

    Here’s your reminder that the fraud is still continuing – boldly, even! – after months of nonstop reporting about it.

    Katie Daviscourt of the Post Millennial did some looking into Somali-run daycares in the Seattle area, many of which receive tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars monthly, and you’ll never guess what she found.

    Most showed no signs of kids.

    Many neighbors say they’ve never seen anything that looks like a daycare in the area!

    These families get together, watch each other’s kids sometimes, incorporate as a “daycare,” and collect tens of thousands a month.

    Here’s the PM:

    In total, Daviscourt reported that in just two neighborhoods there were over $5 million in potential abuses of taxpayer funds, and they had gone to over 20 locations reporting to be daycare locations. Under Seattle’s Child Care Assistance Program, daycares can request government funding in order to back their businesses when they are caring for low-to-middle-income families.

  • “Trump Administration Removes 760,000 ACA Enrollees, Citing Fraud and Improper Enrollment.”

    Vice President JD Vance and the White House’s anti-fraud task force canceled Affordable Care Act policies covering more than 760,000 people, the administration announced Tuesday, citing suspected improper and fraudulent enrollments.

    The task force, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimates the move will save taxpayers $2.2 billion.

    Following the cancellation of 315,000 enrollments, the vice president said officials are going to conduct “additional verification” on about 419,000 more enrollees, whom they suspect may be improperly enrolled or ineligible for the program. Similarly, the Trump administration is banning some insurance brokers who are thought to be complicit in the fraudulent enrollment.

    “We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled,” Vance said. “We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits.”

    Snip.

    “This is what the fraud task force is all about,” the vice president said, alongside CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and other senior administration officials at Tuesday’s press conference. “Saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important” are not victim to waste and fraud.

    Oz noted that CMS has issued termination notices to hundreds of brokers, including 469 in late August, and has placed a moratorium on new agents and brokers while officials investigate the eligibility of the additional 419,000 enrollees.

    “There will be no new brokers for Obamacare in this country for the next six months, and we do not feel at all conflicted about that decision, because most of the fraud, a disproportionate amount of the fraud, is taking place from these individuals,” Oz said.

    The ACA — colloquially known as Obamacare — was passed in 2010 under former President Barack Obama.

    And its baleful effects on health care and the federal budget live on…

  • “California’s Shadow Welfare System for Illegal Immigrants.”

    California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden. To sustain the arrangement, the state imposes the nation’s highest tax rates.

    In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime.

    We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal aliens can enroll in public-welfare programs or receive benefits on their children’s behalf. In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year. The state’s shadow welfare system, it seems, shows no signs of slowing down.

    Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.

    “If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”

    In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.

    “If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the officer said of CalWORKs, the state’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”

    These benefits add up. In California, illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health insurance, and various tax credits. Their children qualify for others, including CalWORKs and, as in other states, Section 8 rental subsidies. All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two U.S.-born children, and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year.

    State leaders are proud of it. In a recent podcast episode, Governor Gavin Newsom bragged about his “controversial” decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encouraged people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program whose promotional materials assure applicants that “no Social Security number” is “no problem.”

    Snip.

    Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens. To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.

    Medicaid is a good example. Federal law prohibits states from using federal dollars to provide wraparound coverage to illegal immigrants. So, California used a state-funding “bucket” within its Medi-Cal program to extend “full-scope” coverage to illegal aliens. The expansions enrolled some 1.7 million people, costing the state an estimated $10 billion annually—more than twice what the state legislative analyst originally projected.

    California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.

    Another way that California shuffles cash to illegal immigrants is through those aliens’ children. CalWORKs allows illegal-immigrant parents to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born kids. BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare clearinghouse, even tells applicants that the program will accept a “statement” that the applicant “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible” to qualify for the program.

    This model—permissive rules and large loopholes—costs the state billions per year. As benefits and eligibility continue to expand, that figure will only increase in the years ahead.

    California shows no sign of paring back this largesse. In 2022, Newsom signed a bill into law that extended taxpayer-funded food benefits to illegal low-income residents. Beginning next October, qualified Californians 55 and older will become eligible for that program, regardless of immigration status. California’s Legislative Analyst estimates that it could cost up to an additional $400 million a year.

    Is there any doubt that California Democrats love illegal aliens far more than citizens? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “The Smell of Corruption at Karen Bass’ L.A. Homeless Authority.

    California Democrats pulled up the ladder to prevent the likes of Nick Shirley and local reporters like JJ Smith, Amy Reichert, and many others from finding out where millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars were fraudulently spent.

    In my story, Karen Bass Feels Heat From Feds Over Millions in Stolen and Laundered ‘Homeless’ Funds, we learned that Bill Essayli, who’s supposed to be the U.S. attorney in Central California (LA area) but isn’t because John Thune can’t do his job, this week announced the arrests and indictments of four individuals who had stolen millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars. They were supposed to house and help the homeless, but they helped themselves instead.

    After the indictments were announced and after the U.S. House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Authority operators to please come to Washington to have a little chat — under oath — the homeless authority announced it no longer wanted to receive federal funding and, in fact, plans to get out of the homeless business entirely.

    Bass and the people in Los Angeles who have run this agency into the ground after bilking taxpayers for years are getting out of the homeless business.

    The California Post reports, “LAHSA will not seek to retain responsibility for the annual application for federal homelessness funding, the Homeless Management Information System, the annual point-in-time count or the coordinated-entry system.”

    The same federal funding that came from your pockets and mine. The same federal funding lost after these alleged California homeless advocates threw piles of cash in front of an industrial fan and pointed it in the general direction of people who deserve to be in prison.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • The enemy within: “Poll: 59% of Dems support military coup against Trump, 32% support assassination.”
  • “FP-7 Pelican Ballistic Missile Used to Strike Moscow! Oil Refinery & Warehouse Hit Hard!”
  • Follow-up: “Satellite imagery shows significant damage to Moscow Oil Refinery after Ukraine’s drone strike yesterday. Multiple strikes are recorded and oil tanks confirmed destroyed. Additionally, a Pantsir booster intercepted a car.”
  • “Big Drone Strike on Perm Oil Refinery! 1,500km from Ukraine!” Multiple strikes on a refinery they previously hit in March.
  • “Kuibyshev Oil Refinery Hit Hard by Drones.” Again.
  • “Ukraine Targets Russian Rail Logistics: Two Trains & Fuel Tank Cars Hit By Drones.”
  • More: “Operation Barrel: Multiple Russian Fuel Trains and Tank Cars Destroyed!”
  • “Multiple Aircraft Confirmed Destroyed at Rostov: An-12 & An-26 Transporters and X2 Mi-8 Helicopters.”
  • “Big JDAM Air Strike on Troop Concentration in Bilytske, Donetsk.” Early in the war, Ukraine couldn’t have carried out a JDAM strike, due to fears of Russian aircraft and SAM batteries, indicating serious Ukrainian degradation of those categories of Russian weapons.
  • “Huge Explosion as Ukraine Hits Fuel/Ammo Storage in Zaporizhzhia.”
  • “Ukraine Hits Warehouse Loaded with Ammunition Shells: Big Blast.” “This was in Huliaipole, Zaporizhzhia.”
  • More winning: “Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up.”

    Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity. This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it’s the most utility shutdown events in the country’s recent history.

    Even when Cuba’s grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time. Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff.

    “Protocols are now in place to begin ​the gradual restoration of the system,” said Felix Estrada, an ⁠official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of ​scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of ​the city remained completely dark.

    Many exhausted residents ​of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.

    “Yesterday I’d gone without ‌power ⁠for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.

  • The U.S. is spending $500 million on laser weapons, and some have already been deployed in theater.

    Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.

    The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.

    The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.

    A linked story suggests it’s the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Greg Gutfeld is rightly upset that Austin’s commie twerp of a U.S. rep is more upset at an illegal alien getting shot than the murder of Andrew Wimsatt, an American citizen he theoretically represented.

  • How shadowy leftist NGOs pay to put their people into government positions.

    We often hear leftists accuse billionaires of buying government, and most times the accusations are at least partly off-base.

    But not always, and sometimes they are literally doing precisely that: putting privately funded leftists into government offices to run a parallel government that nobody ever voted for. It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.

    One such program, funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, placed and paid the salaries of “government employees” strategically inserted into Attorney General offices in Blue states, funding regulations and lawsuits aimed at targets that Bloomberg’s NYU-based NGO program identified as vulnerable to its pressure. The goal was, of course, fighting climate change.

    BREAKING: Bloomberg-Backed Climate Group Paying Salaries of Democratic State AG Officials Quietly Shuts Down Amid Congressional, Legal Scrutiny.

    “A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.”

    Think of it as a cousin to “Zuckerbucks,” where a private entity funds a program that places people in government offices as either quasi- or fully government employees, with a mandate to pursue the NGO’s agenda. The same sort of thing happens with grants to news organizations, where an outside group pays for employees or “coverage” of specific issues, and the stories are still technically the product of the news organization, but the content is directed at producing the results desired by the people who cut the checks.

    Snip.

    Bloomberg, cut a big check to NYU, which in turn established a program to place its people directly into the offices of State Attorneys General, where they proceeded to sue and harass businesses targeted by the organization.

    James Comer opened an investigation into the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, and out of the blue, it closed. He sought documents from it, and “poof!” It’s gone.

    Pretty sus, bro. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • How Angela Merkel destroyed Germany’s political center.

    In my view, Angela Merkel bears a grave responsibility for the collapse of the centre and the growing ability of the political extremes to set the agenda.

    The almost one-third of voters who would support Alternative für Deutschland in a national election are not fascists or Nazis. A substantial proportion are disillusioned CDU voters.

    What has disappointed these voters? First, what I see as Merkel’s failures on so many fronts: immigration. Security. Energy. A sustainable strategy for business and economic growth. Digitalisation. Infrastructure maintenance. The list is almost endless.

    Second, the extraordinary denial of reality that, in my assessment, Merkel allowed to take hold when it came to immigrants’ responsibility for antisemitism, violence against women, terrorism and gang crime.

    Coming from Denmark, where we have reliable statistics on all these matters, I find it frankly shocking to listen to the nonsense coming from Germany’s political elite.

    But I would also trace back to Merkel the rise of what is often called “Islamo-leftism” – a tendency that has recently gained ground in Sweden and is also growing in Germany. In Sweden, polls have indicated that 85 per cent of Muslim voters support parties to the left of centre, with almost one in five supporting the Left Party, Vänsterpartiet – a party tainted by antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism. I see no compelling reason to assume that the pattern in Germany is fundamentally different.

    My argument, then, is that it is not only the rise in support for the AfD that can be traced back to Merkel. The same applies to the growing support for parties on the German left that promote the political and religious views of a significant proportion of the people, Merkel invited to Germany. Not least on the Gaza question.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Both Democrats and the international left has derided President Trump’s focus on Greenland, saying the U.S. controlling it was a fantasy. Now that he’s signed an agreement with Denmark, I doubt they’re laughing now.

    The US-Greenland-Denmark agreement has now been published. I haven’t read it, but Arnaud Bertrand has. This is his analysis of the terms, which appear very favorable to the United States, and well calculated to achieve the goal of preventing undue influence over the Arctic by any hostile power.

    Snip.

    To sum up:

    – The US secured a permanent military foothold that even an independent Greenland would inherit whether it likes it or not
    – The US now has veto power over any non-NATO military presence in Greenland, and over who can invest in its strategic infrastructure and resources (beyond NATO and the EU)
    – Denmark signed away its say over the principle of new US bases, with only the right to discuss the “implementation details”
    – Danish authorities no longer set the rules for US military movement across the island
    – And all of it is now justified by the defense of “the American continent”

  • Lindsay Clancy holdout juror Michael P. Desronvil speaks out.

    Michael is a Catholic from a Haitian immigrant family and moved to Massachusetts when he was a young child.

    The liberal women who so badly want to destroy him for refusing to acquit a child killer do not know how to handle that. Their woke brains simply cannot compute how to proceed.

    Several jurors who wanted to let Clancy off the hook have claimed that Michael did not follow the jury instructions, but they have incriminated themselves with statements indicating they had an ideological agenda in the courtroom. Michael says he “kept getting cut off” by these other jurors, who apparently knew his own thoughts better than him.

    This lines up with a statement from a fourth juror who says she was ultimately badgered into changing her vote.”

    A female 4th juror comes forward and says the other jurors were pushing to acquit on *DAY 1*

  • In fact, a whole lot of basic jury procedures seem to have been discarded in the Clancy trial. “Lindsay Clancy jurors broke cardinal rule and used phones to RESEARCH killer mom during deliberations, holdout claims.”
  • “Feds arrest, indict hundreds in Trump voter fraud crackdown: ‘Catching it all over the country.’ The Justice Department says its crackdown on noncitizen voting and election fraud has already produced more than 200 arrests and indictments, with that number possibly doubling soon and state election officials themselves now facing potential charges for looking the other way.”

    Since the Trump Justice Department warned state and local election officials that they could be charged with allowing fraudulent voting activities, more than 200 arrests and indictments have been secured in a crackdown on election fraud and noncitizen voting, and that number could double soon, a top official revealed to Just the News.

    “I think there are a lot of nervous election officials because I think some of them know that they’ve been looking the other way when this is happening, and we’re catching it all over the country,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said Monday night in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.

    Dhillon also hinted at further developments in the coming weeks, suggesting her department has developed evidence calling into question New Jersey’s claim that a computer glitch allowed thousands of foreigners to register to vote in that state and about 400 to actually cast ballots in violation of law.

    “I’m not sure we have the correct numbers from New Jersey. They’re not really cooperating with us, and so we will get to the bottom of what happened there. And you know, New Jersey tried to blame a vendor for a mistake or a glitch, quote unquote. But you know, I think there’ll be another side to that story,” she said.

    Snip.

    Over the weekend, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that his agency is investigating 1,620 cases of voter fraud involving noncitizens and has made 151 arrests. He said his department is also looking into an additional 300,000 cases based on states’ voter rolls.

  • That thing that never happens keeps happening. “DOJ Charges 16 Noncitizens in Voter Fraud Cases.”
  • “More Canadians now die from government-assisted “suicide” than Americans die from gun homicides.”
  • Howard Dean speaks to the ChiComs: “DNC Chairman Emeritus Howard Dean delivered the American welcome address at a China dialogue involving the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank identified in congressional commission testimony as ‘run by Chinese intelligence.’ The Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, which co-organized the event⁠, has an equally explicit allegiance. Its charter⁠ says it: ‘upholds the comprehensive leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Ted Cruz digs into EPIC City’s ties to CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

    Ties between the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the proposed EPIC City development in North Texas came under scrutiny during a recent U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing chaired by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

    EPIC City, which has been criticized as an Islamic enclave and housing development exclusive to Muslims, is a proposal from the East Plano Islamic Center.

    The Wednesday hearing of the subcommittee on federal courts, oversight, agency action, and federal rights was titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.”

    Sen. Cruz addressed the fact that Democrat senators failed to attend the meeting, stating that “their campaign is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America.”

    Cruz heard from witnesses that alleged ties between CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and EPIC City.

    Arielle F. Klepach, senior litigation counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center, called attention to the connection in her written testimony.

    She likened the EPIC City development, later rebranded as “The Meadow” following significant backlash, to a pattern of “mega-mosque” building projects in Europe commonly motivated by “Islamist separatism.”

    This movement is a “deliberate attempt to cut Muslim communities off spiritually, intellectually, and culturally from the surrounding secular society,” with the building projects in particular “generally [containing] community-like features such as schools, libraries, and gyms,” according to Klepach.

    “The American version of this pattern is EPIC City,” Klepach said. “CAIR-Texas and CAIR-DFW have publicly defended EPIC City in the disputes, and CAIR’s national leadership has spoken at the EPIC mosque, reflecting an active advocacy relationship between CAIR and the EPIC religious community.”

    The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was designated a foreign terrorist organization by Gov. Greg Abbott late last year, along with the Muslim Brotherhood.

    The hearing also revisited CAIR’s role as an unindicted co-conspirator to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). The foundation and five of its officials were convicted of “funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas” during a 2008 federal trial. CAIR was not charged in the case.

    Lara Burns, senior research fellow for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, drew the connection between CAIR and Hamas in her written testimony.

    “The United States Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee served as the original Hamas infrastructure in the United States, initially consisting of the HLF (the fundraising arm),” alongside others, according to Burns.

    “At the [2008] trial, still today the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in American history, [various arms of the Muslim Brotherhood] were identified as unindicted co-conspirators/joint ventures as was [CAIR],” she added.

    (Previously.)

  • A father-and-son serial killer house of horror found in Pennsylvania.

    A Pennsylvania father and son have come under suspicion after the son was discovered to be traveling with a woman with a fake ID that used the name of a missing woman.

    Police searched the home of the man and his dad and found the most disturbing scene imaginable.

    he investigation is still unfolding but this is some seriously unsettling stuff going on.

    Here’s the latest from ABC 6 in Philly on the now 7 missing women connected to this case against Eugene Horsch and his deceased father RC:

    Blair Tonzelli was 35 years old when she went missing in 2023. She was the first woman named in this case.

    Police say when Horsch was arrested, he was with a woman in possession of an identification card with Tonzelli’s name on it. The woman allegedly told police Eugene Horsch gave her the ID.

    Amy McHale was 44 years old when she was last seen in 2016. Shortly after news broke of Horsch’s arrest, her family told Action she was last seen at the W. Chew Avenue house.

    McHale had previously been married to Ray Horsch, who has also become a central figure in this case.

    Gabrielle Amarando was 22 years old when she disappeared in 2012.

    A childhood friend of Amarando told Action News that loved ones grew increasingly concerned when they stopped hearing from her…

    Roughly 14 years later, her family got the confirmation they were looking for.

    In August, police said the women were seen in photos and videos recovered during the investigation, in which both are seen alive and then later appearing to be dead.

    ‘Based on the video and photo evidence — if the images in the video are real and not altered in any way, based on their review — the M.E. would believe the individuals depicted in the images are deceased,’ Philadelphia Police Inspector Ray Evers.

    Maribel Fresses was the other woman seen in the videos and photos. She [was] 27 when she disappeared in 2018.

    Police also saw photos and videos of two other unidentified women, both alive and then dead, as well as video of the elder Horsch strangling a woman to death.

    Five urns believed to have the unidentified remains of five women were found in the home.

    Millions of photos and videos have so far revealed that at least 7 women who went missing ultimately met their demise at the hands of the Horsches.

    Shades of H. H. Holmes…

  • UK functionaries go out of their way to protect their precious illegal aliens. “British government mobilizes HUNDREDS of police and defense units to protect migrant boat from British protesters.”

    Third World migrants are being led across the channel by French authorities, where British police then escort them into harbor, put them aboard taxpayer-funded coach buses, and give them a police escort with hundreds of officers.

    Snip.

    Earlier in the day, British protesters gathered by land and by sea to peacefully demonstrate against a group of 60 or so migrants that was set to land in southern England in Gosport.

    Because of the protesters gathered along the coast, authorities had to scramble to find a new landing spot for the “newcomers.” The buses were seen with a massive police escort.

    The reason for the escort was due to the fear that the British protesters would get “mostly peaceful” and attack the invaders or the masked bus drivers who are helping traffic them into the country:

    One GB News reporter summed up the massive taxpayer expenditure that was spent to assist the migrants:

    The whole thing from start to finish today, for this one boat of 60-odd or however many it turns out to be, to go all the way flanked by a massive French ship, then to our [Royal National Lifeboat Institution] boats, then all of those resources pumped into Gosport.

    And THEN, it looks as though because of the local reaction, they’ve decided to not to that, take them down either to Eastport or Dover or somewhere else anyway.

    So goodness knows what the resources are going to be like there.

    We are talking MILLIONS of Pounds today alone, for a group of 60 illegal migrants.

    Is there any doubt the Labour government prioritizes importing illegal aliens into the country over taking care of their own citizens?

  • “Texas Daycare Faces Lawsuit For Running ‘Toddler Fight Club.'”

    Forget about Somali daycare fraud for a moment – have you heard about toddler fight club? A daycare in Fort Worth, TX is facing investigations and litigation after evidence showed staff abusing young children and forcing them to fight each other.

    One mother, Heather Harris, knew something was wrong when she picked up her 4-year-old son at the Arka Montessori Academy of Risinger daycare. He was crying uncontrollably and was covered in bruises. Employees told the mother her son had fought with another child, but their explanations did not add up, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Harris and her husband, Richard Harris. She insisted on seeing the classroom’s surveillance footage.

    The disturbing footage shows staff at the daycare swing a child around like a rag-doll and trying to force him to fight another child.

    I’m skipping right past the obvious “First Rule of Toddler Fight Club” joke to point out that if my (theoretical) kid were forced into that, both daycare and the employees would be facing both a huge civil lawsuit and criminal charges.

  • More horrifying child abuse: “Transgender ICU nurse arrested on multiple counts of abusing NICU baby at Michigan hospital.”

    [Kieran Ansley], a now-former nurse at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has been charged with child abuse after a 4-month-old girl in his [sic] care was found with multiple broken bones and bruising.

    The injuries were noticed by the infant’s mother during an early morning visit in April, records show. Tests and a full skeletal survey found multiple fractures, including broken leg bones and multiple bruises, court records show. Bruising was found on the infant’s hands, arms, thigh, buttocks, abdomen and tongue, court records show.

    ‘The totality of the findings resulted in a diagnosis of pediatric physical abuse,’ court documents show.

    More horrifying details snipped. Hell’s too good for him.

  • “Texas Stock Exchange Sees First Listing Transfer. Wall Street is trading its loafers for a pair of cowboy boots.”

    Dallas’ “Y’all Street” continues to capitalize on momentum as the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) enters a new era of growth.

    North Texas has added a stock exchange alongside its iconic stockyards, and companies are beginning to flock to the TXSE’s transfer portal. TXSE opened in July, and September has seen the first corporate commitments and primary listing transfers.

    On September 16, Texas Capital’s Texas Equity Index exchange-traded fund (ETF) and Texas Oil Index ETF became the TXSE’s first primary listings. The company’s CEO, President, and Chairman, Rob Holmes, rang the bell on “Y’all Street” to celebrate the company’s primary listing transfer. Texas Capital was formerly listed on the Nasdaq.

    Holmes stated in a Bloomberg interview about the transfer, “Once this exchange came to fruition, it was our responsibility to look at the three exchanges and pick the best one for Texas Capital.”

    He praised the TXSE’s investor base as an affirmation of the exchange’s technological and strategic innovation. The TXSE saw over $275 million in total investment, with major investors including BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Charles Schwab.

    Competing securities exchanges include the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, both based in New York City.

    Holmes asserted that TXSE’s net present value (NPV) is “better” than its New York rivals.

    “On this exchange, instead of just paying a fee, we pay a fee, but at the end of the day we have a net cash position from the exchange,” he said.

    If someone can explain what that last sentence means, please do so in the comments…

  • “Democrat candidate caught crying in the back of cop car after DUI arrest. Washington state Democratic House candidate Krista Perez was seen crying, praying and sobbing in the back of a patrol car after her DUI arrest.” Washington state has a jungle primary, with two Democratic candidates for House of Representatives District 29-Position 1 (the state has 49 districts of two reps each) facing each other in November, so Republicans won’t be able to take advantage here.
  • Jay Leno’s Law, exempting classic cars from California’s draconian emissions regulations, was signed into law in a rare act of sanity from Governor Hairgel. But note it doesn’t take effect until January 1, 2028.
  • To break AIs, no need to ask it to calculate pi to the last digit. Asking how many “e”s in “seventeen” will do…
  • The many lighting tricks Stanley Kubrick used to shoot Barry Lyndon. (And if you haven’t seen Barry Lyndon, you should. I found it extremely funny…)
  • So Carrot Top tried to kill himself over attempted blackmail using a sex tape? Can’t say I’m a huge fan of his work, but he should avoid trying to off himself. And now, with that thin justification, here’s the classic Norm Macdonald bit on Carrot Top:

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Speaking of Norm Macdonald, if I had Netflix, I would watch this, though I suspect I’ve already seen 75% of it in YouTube clips.
  • “New Underground Railroad Established To Help Lone Black Juror Escape From Angry White Liberals In The North.”
  • “Canada Clarifies That By ‘Assisted Suicide’ They Mean ‘Totally Unsolicited Murder.‘”
  • “Husband In Critical Condition After Attempting Two Minutes Of Beginner’s Yoga.”
  • The Pittie who thinks he’s a cat:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.