A reminder not to get black-pilled, another Supreme Court win for deporting illegal alien felons, San Francisco’s government offers pedos a veritable buffet, Rockefeller money is going to the ChiComs, and another deeply technical video on semiconductor processes you won’t click on.
Yes, I want to believe, but there’s evidence supporting hope. There’s evidence supporting the idea that the polls are so substantially flawed that they do not accurately reflect what’s going to happen. Again, the caveat – this could be delusion. We could be seeing what we want to see. But then, what we’re seeing is there. There is evidence supporting what we want to happen, evidence worth considering.
We’re seeing how polls have been missing big lately. Look at Abdul El-Sayed. He was supposed to win that Michigan primary in a walk. We’re talking five, 10, 15 points, according to the primary polls. And yet he barely squeaked past that squeaky woman he was competing with. We’ve seen lots of other polls that assured us of a Democrat victory. Just ask President Harris about that.
If you’ve been around a while, you know that the polls always favor the Democrats. You almost never see a Democrat surprise us by exceeding his polling against a Republican. You just don’t. So, there’s that. And of course, there’s an interest in driving down Republican enthusiasm by telling people they can’t win.
Then there’s the gut vibe. Don’t completely disregard that. In Texas, you must believe the Texans are going to support a blasphemous, anti-meat, anti-gun, anti-white, woke weirdo with a thing for trans kids. Does that sound like Texas to you? It sure doesn’t sound like Texas to me, and I’m in Texas. I’ve talked to a lot of Texan conservatives. Not one thinks this guy is going to win. Now, they agree it could theoretically happen, but they don’t think it’s going to. Ken Paxton has won three times in statewide races, and he’s done a lot of great conservative things. Are Texans really going to choose a bizarre homunculus to spend six years in Washington, D.C., voting like Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) in their name? It just doesn’t fit. It’s weird. That’s not saying it couldn’t happen – there are lots of communists here along with other weirdos, losers, and mutations who would be thrilled to have this geebo as a Lone Star senator. But it just doesn’t feel like something that’s going to happen.
Moreover, we’ve been told a lot of conservatives are going to sit this out. The bots on X are certainly pushing that coordinated message, as the semi-coherent comments on my Monday column about quitters demonstrate. Yes, there are probably some Republicans who are going to sit out this midterm, but I haven’t met any of them personally. Maybe you have. I just don’t think there are a lot of them, especially in light of how appalling the Democrats are. It doesn’t make sense, at least to people who aren’t idiots who blame everything on Epstein conspiracies and the Jews and blah blah blah, to be mad at Trump and the Republicans for not being conservative enough and showing them what-for by allowing the election of communists. As risky as it is, I’m not going all-in on the assumption that people are that stupid.
Read the whole thing, and encourage all your sane friends to show up at the polls in November.
Dr. Anthony Fauci privately sounded the alarm when he learned the U.S. Army had conducted an experiment a decade ago that aerosolized the lethal Ebola virus, which is not normally transmitted by air, and then shared the results publicly amid an ongoing outbreak in Africa, according to diary entries obtained by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul.
The then-top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease was particularly concerned in 2016 that the Army medical research arm’s experiment seemed to show that exposure to aerosolized Ebola caused more damaging effects in subjects that had been vaccinated. This was almost four years before he championed shutting down the U.S. economy and social life over the COVID-19 virus outbreak.
Fauci wrote he believed such research should be kept secret, preferably classified, so that it didn’t undermine public confidence in vaccination in the African countries suffering an outbreak of the virus.
“What idiots those guys at USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] are,” Fauci wrote in a March 2016 diary entry. “This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place.”
Why yes, “undermining public confidence in vaccination” is a far bigger concern than the fact that the U.S. Army under Obama was committing an actual war crime.
It’s Tuesday morning at Little Learners Daycare in downtown San Francisco. Teacher Wendy herds bright-eyed toddlers, amped up after playtime in the courtyard, back inside. They’re laughing and swatting at each other playfully, oblivious to the pack of pedophiles lurking nearby.
Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex offenders live at 111 Taylor Street. Wendy knew that the Tenderloin, where she operates her Mandarin-immersion daycare, was dangerous. It’s a hotbed for illegal drug activity and homelessness. But she didn’t realize that sex offenders live so close to her daycare—or that taxpayers fund their housing.
Pedophiles, illegal aliens; the only people Democrats don’t like paying for housing for is law-abiding American citizens.
According to this City Journal investigation, more than 25 percent of sex offenders in San Francisco with addresses in the Megan’s Law database live in taxpayer-subsidized buildings. Many live near a park, school, or daycare, or reside in a neighborhood with a high concentration of children. They do all of this despite statewide efforts to ban concentrating pedophiles so close to children. Instead of listening to California voters, San Francisco has become a taxpayer-funded dumping ground for sex criminals.
The Taylor Street Center is one of San Francisco’s most heavily populated sex-offender residences. Located in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street houses at least 31 registered sex offenders. The taxpayer-funded California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons contract the private GEO Group to run the facility.
The reentry complex can house 240 people. It hosts specialized programs for residents like “cultural diversity education,” “gender-responsive groups,” and a “weekly meditation group.” The facility sits just 400 feet from a daycare center, 1,000 feet from a fourth-to-eighth-grade school, and five blocks away from a preschool.
Any sex offender housed in the Tenderloin is bound to encounter children. Along with having a high concentration of immigrant and low-income households, the neighborhood also has the highest concentration of kids in the entire city.
I’m sure the sex offenders call that “the buffet.”
President Trump invoked a rare and legally contested power Friday to cancel $810 million in congressionally approved spending, targeting programs for illegal immigrants and a slate of federal initiatives explicitly organized around race and DEI.
The request hits 11 funding pools at seven departments and agencies. It also landed with just five days left in the fiscal year. That’s the point of the disputed “pocket rescission” maneuver: the money runs out before Congress gets its normal 45 days to consider the cuts.
The biggest piece is $567 million at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for services to refugees, asylees, unaccompanied minors, and other non-citizens.
The White House called them “pro-illegal immigration programs” and said the money is no longer needed because illegal border crossings have fallen sharply.
But immigration spending was only part of the package.
Several of the rescissions hit programs explicitly organized around race or ethnicity.
The administration wants to rescind $10 million from the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, which helps minority-owned businesses. The White House pointed to a 2024 federal court ruling that found the agency’s presumption of social disadvantage based on race or ethnicity unconstitutional.
Another $5 million would come from HHS’s Office of Minority Health.
The White House highlighted grants from that office addressing racial trauma among black youth, health disparities among black and Latino youth, a George Washington University fellowship promoting health equity and DEI, and a $1.5 million project addressing the effects of redlining and structural racism.
HUD housing counseling takes a much larger hit, with $56 million targeted.
The administration said the program had funded groups including UnidosUS, the National Urban League, and Housing Action Illinois, criticizing their work on structural racism, racial justice, and other DEI priorities.
Then there is the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, slated to lose $15 million.
The office’s mission included “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions” and restoring racial stability. The Trump administration shut it down earlier this year and now accuses the office of promoting critical race theory and gender ideology rather than carrying out that mission.
The package goes beyond those programs.
The administration identified $28 million in HHS research funding it wants canceled, pointing to grants involving transgender health care, racial disparities, and a $50,000 project to develop a research agenda addressing racism in emergency medicine. Another $70 million would be pulled from international education programs, including programs the White House said had funded research involving queer and transgender issues abroad.
Other cuts include $25 million for migrant student programs, $25 million across two DHS programs providing services or legal assistance to non-citizens, and $9 million for a Treasury program providing debt relief to foreign countries in exchange for conservation commitments.
Now we need to hand out pink slips to the people who were administering these programs.
Long overdue: “Education Dept. Officially Removes Biden’s Title IX Gender Identity Rules. In other words, the department is sticking to the literal interpretation of Title IX: sex-based discrimination.”
The Education Department has officially rescinded the Biden Administration’s Title IX interpretation that extended protections to students based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In other words, the department is sticking to Title IX’s literal meaning: sex-based discrimination.
“Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.”
Honestly, nothing changes because the department has been enforcing reality since January 2025: Title IX is based on sex. It’s not based on your sexual orientation or gender identity.
Somehow, the people who tell us that they were “born this way” and that “sexuality is a spectrum” are now returning to normal. It’s almost like the whole “acceptance” movement was just a social contagion that spread because teens like being rebellious!
The Supreme Court majority (6-3) has granted the DOJ request to put on hold a Boston-based US District Judge ruling that DHS policy to remove illegal aliens to so-called third countries is unlawful. The process of rapid deportation will continue while the matter is called before the Supreme Court for oral arguments in December (ruling in ’27).
The Usual Suspects opposed deporting the Democrat Party’s precious illegal alien felons.
Former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed at least 4,782 political donations to President Donald Trump from Americans across the country between September 2019 and August 2023, Senator Chuck Grassley revealed during a Tuesday hearing featuring the former special counsel.
The checks — which Smith’s team acquired as part of their election case against Trump, dubbed “Arctic Frost” — contained donors’ personal information, including their home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures. Some of the subpoenaed donations were for as little as $1. Grassley revealed the evidence while questioning Smith during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing and followed up with a press release containing further details.
During former President Joe Biden’s administration, Smith brought two cases against Trump: The first accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and the second involved him keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Smith resigned from his position nine days before Trump was sworn in as president again; both cases against Trump have been dismissed.
As part of the FBI’s investigation into the 2020 election, agents accessed toll records, which show who a given individual spoke with on the phone but not the contents of their calls, for 16 members of Congress. He also subpoenaed records from 87 Trump White House phones, which captured records from calls between government sources and dozen of news outlets.
The political donations Grassley described were obtained as part of Smith’s investigation, which focused on whether Trump defrauded donors by raising money under the false pretext that the resulting donations would help Trump’s team overturn the results of the 2020 election.
All the easier to compile an enemies list should Democrats retake power…
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a $1.4 billion U.S.-based charity with funding from the Rockefeller family and other donors, has forged a “dangerous partnership with Communist China” and is pouring millions of dollars into China-based nonprofits that are advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy goals.
That’s one of the findings in a new report, “The Rockefeller Network: How the Rockefeller Family Turned Their Oil Fortune into Extreme Climate Activism,” out today from Americans for Public Trust, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative watchdog organization. The report, an advance copy of which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, outlines how the billion-dollar fortune of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., who died in 1937, is being used “to quietly bankroll numerous radical and leftist projects.”
Snip.
“An alarming amount—well into the millions—has found its way directly into the coffers of entities that are either official vestiges of the Chinese government, or directly and irrefutably administered by the CCP and its representatives,” the report says. “And many of these entities, while operating under the guise of ‘green’ and environmental research, are, instead, using these funds to help buttress China’s foreign influence programs around the globe, especially the CCP’s infamous ‘Belt and Road Initiative.'”
Among the grants singled out in the report as most problematic:
— $400,000 between 2020 and 2024 to the Foreign Environment Cooperation Center, “a division of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.”
— Nearly $1.5 million to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, whose “direct ties to the Chinese government are undeniable.”
— Nearly $200,000 to Tsinghua University, which announced in 2024 that the school’s office of the president had merged with the Chinese Communist Party to “form a new Party Committee Office that would run the school.”
Groups that fund the ChiComs should have their non-profit status revoked and their assets seized.
Democrats are always saying the quiet part out loud nowadays.
They aren’t even trying to hide their radical plans to totally replace America’s voters, workers, and people with a cheap labor underclass that disproportionately votes Democrat.
[ U.S. Representative] Democrat Tom Suozzi says his biggest goal in politics is mass amnesty for criminal illegals:
“My biggest goal of what I want to accomplish in politics right now is I want to legalize 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 million people in our country.”
Amnesty was always the end goal for the illegal alien importation.
Obvious: “UK Whistleblower: 99 percent of Asylum Claims Are Fake.”
Only one in 100 asylum claims are genuine, according to a whistleblower who has revealed widespread fraud and dysfunction in the system.
The Home Office official, who has worked for years as a decision-maker on asylum and has assessed thousands of claims, said asylum seekers from certain countries use the “same script” in what he and colleagues describe as “package claims”.
He said he had encountered a large number of Iraqi Kurds claiming asylum who said they had been in a relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan region. The official said it had become a “running joke” among colleagues that the number of Iraqi Kurds who said they were involved with the daughter was in the “hundreds”.
He also said that “hundreds” of claims from Pakistanis were based on the assertion that they were in fear of their lives in their home country because of their gay relationship with the same man who had provided letters supporting their claims.
The source also disclosed suspicions about large numbers of Bangladeshi claimants purporting to be dissidents of the former governing party, which is now banned, even though they were unable to provide basic information about the group.
An 18-year-old woman has been gang raped and beaten by up to ten different men, many of them with a Syrian background, in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Although the rape occurred in May 2025, the suspects are only now being arrested. In response to the rape, political leader Geert Wilders wrote that the Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs and called for all the perpetrators to be removed from the country along with their families.
Six suspects have now been arrested, aged 20 to 23. During the incident, the girl, who lived in a residential group home, was driven to two different parking lots and raped by several men, some of whom filmed the assault and shared it on Snapchat. Police say the woman was humiliated and beaten.
And somehow the leaders of UK’s Labour Party say “Yes, we need more of that.”
A plane leaving Dubai and heading towards Tel Aviv almost saw a tragic end as the co-pilot of the plane turned hijacker mid-flight and attempted to take control and crash the plane….
The co-pilot, an Omani national, stabbed the pilot multiple times in an attempt to kill him and hijack the flight. The co-pilot had worked for FlyDubai for around a year.
The injured pilot was able to transmit a radio warning, Israel scrambled fighter jets, and the passengers and crew were able to subdue the attacker in midair.
The plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia to sort the entire mess out.
Be prepared to fight for your life on a moment’s notice, because you might have to.
More long overdue. “Trump expands H-1B visa crackdown, will scrutinize layoffs.”
The Trump administration on Thursday announced an executive order expanding the ongoing crackdown against H-1B visa abuse.
The H-1B is a visa program designed to allow companies to bring in high-skilled workers when no qualified Americans are available. But the program has faced considerable scrutiny in recent years, due to widespread fraud. Critics have argued that major employers also use it as a way to undercut American wages.
Trump’s Thursday order reaffirms the $100,000 application fee he imposed last year, but now mandates inter-agency coordination to consider an employers’s recent or planned layoffs when applying for H-1B visas.
“Our message to corporate America is simple: We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor,” Vice President JD Vance said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 121 individuals during a summer enforcement initiative around Lake Lewisville in Dallas.
The operation, led by ICE’s Dallas field office, began June 27 and concluded over Labor Day weekend. It involved coordination with state and federal agencies, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and focused on identifying individuals unlawfully present in the country, assisting with lake-related investigations, and allowing local officers to devote more resources to boating safety enforcement.
According to ICE’s Friday release, individuals arrested during the initiative had criminal histories involving offenses such as assault, family violence, theft, burglary, sexual assault of a child, driving while intoxicated, and boating while intoxicated.
Among those arrested were two men ICE identified as members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization designated by the U.S. State Department as both a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist group.
Willian Josue Ordonez Vasquez, 24, a Venezuelan national, and Edwin Josue Cabrera-Zelaya, 22, a Honduran national, were under investigation by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for allegedly operating an illegal livery business on Lake Lewisville.
I must say that I’ve never run into “illegal livery business” before, but it seems to involve not complying with Texas regulations on powered boat rental.
Man bites dog: “Too extreme for Newsom? California sanctuary bill for abortion, transgender procedures vetoed.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom used his veto pen to make out-of-state prosecutions theoretically possible for both “reproductive health care services” and “gender affirming health care services.”
The term-limited Democrat with presidential ambitions, who recently said he won’t run if fellow Californian and former Democratic nominee Kamala Harris enters the 2028 presidential race, vetoed legislation (AB 2164) to codify an extradition ban for “legally protected health care activity” in California, claiming it infringed executive authority.
Ignore the blather about Harris, Governor Hairgel is obviously running.
Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.
Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.
And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.
They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.
One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.
The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.
The AI didn’t just win. It embarrassed the institution.
Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.
They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.
And they did it in less time.
Let that sink in.
A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.
Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.
This study just proved both of those moats are gone.
When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.
Yeah, but can AI forge friendships with the spawn of rich people, the primary purpose of so many attending the Ivy League? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A Detroit pastor who last year admonished a parishioner for her inadequate church donation of $1,235 was paid a salary of $538,955 that year by a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he leads that is separate from the church, according to federal records.
That salary for Marvin Winans Sr. — the pastor of Perfecting Church and a Grammy-winning gospel singer — accounted for about 61% of what the nonprofit spent toward its stated mission of “community development,” its recent report to the Internal Revenue Service shows.
His role as president for the nonprofit — Perfecting Community Development Corporation — is a half-time job, the report says, which means he was paid about $518 per hour.
Nice work if you can get it.
Winans’ salary has increased substantially in recent years and coincided with a $500,000 government grant the state awarded the nonprofit. Grant application guidance indicates the award was funded with federal pandemic relief money.
Of course it was.
Seems like Pastor Winans was far more concerned with fat stacks than flocks…
Another terror plot thwarted. “Suspect Arrested for Alleged Thwarted Capitol Attack Now in Federal Custody. Benny Caldera, Jr. was released from the Bexar County Jail into federal custody.”
A man was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Texas State Capitol in Austin early in the morning of Wednesday, September 30.
The attack was allegedly set to occur on October 1.
Forty-year-old Benny Caldera, Jr., of Converse, was arrested by a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) SWAT team, according to reporting by NBC DFW.
He was booked into the Bexar County Jail and charged with making a terroristic threat against a public servant, a third degree felony, and was held on a $75,000 bond. It was not immediately clear if Caldera has a lawyer or how he plans to plead in response to the charge.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit, DPS was told by a friend of Caldera’s that he “had made verbal threats to assault the Texas State Capitol Building.” He is alleged to have said “I am going to the Capitol and I am going to shoot it up.”
Arrest documents also allege that Caldera’s motive was anger at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel political lobbying group, of which he reportedly said “these people have to be exterminated.”
Of course. Always The Joooooos!
Possibly just a dumbass shooting off his mouth. But lots of similar dumbasses have racked up kill counts in recent decades.
Make New Mexico Texas again? “Texas House Weighs Annexation of New Mexican Counties. The unlikely proposal could benefit the Permian Basin, one state representative claimed.” The chances of New Mexico agreeing without receiving something ridiculous in return (like El Paso) are virtually zero.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced the company’s decision, saying it is a $684 million capital investment that could create 3,800 jobs. The governor also announced that a Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) grant totaling $43,849,500, paired with a Veteran Created Job Bonus of $40,000, was offered to the company.
ASML wants larger EUV masks to support their High Numerical Aperture EUV stepper. “TSMC and ASML recently announced that the Taiwanese fab will adopt High-NA EUV for high volume manufacturer in 2030. In order to make this economical, the two giants will push the industry to adopt larger 6 in x 12in rectangular photo masks.” This is going to be a challenge for the entire industry ecosystem.
Retro-future noir. With aliens. Directed by Brad Bird. Mood: Cautious optimism.
BeardMeatsFood demolishes a 7 Deadly Sins challenge…and then promptly orders two more burgers and dessert. (OK, technically four more burgers, but it looks like he gave two to the cameraman.)
I just sent out my latest Lame Excuse Books catalog of SF/F/H books. Drop me a line if you’d like to receive a copy.
“Feminist Mad That The Men She Hates Won’t Date Her.” “I don’t get it. I’m aggressive, shrill, angry, and I talk online all the time about how much I hate men. Why won’t any of them ask me out?”
I would buy this so hard: “Mattel Confirms Hanukkah Barbie Comes Complete With Space Laser.”
A happy reunion:
A dog was lost for two days.
They found her and when they took her back to her owner, she started crying. https://t.co/J17xaSYMRe
Greetings, and welcome to a rare Saturday LinkSwarm! This week: The Supreme Court stays the injunction against the Texas redistricting map, a bunch of Twitter fakes exposed, Trump drops the boom on Somali illegal alien scumbags,
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued an administrative stay of Tuesday’s ruling by an El Paso panel of federal judges that rendered the new congressional map passed by Texas Republicans this summer unusable for the 2026 midterm election.
The order restored the new map, pending consideration of the appeal by the State of Texas, and directed the Democratic-aligned parties to submit their response by Monday.
Snip.
The ruling drew a particularly pointed dissent from Judge Jerry Smith, the lone dissenter on the panel, who asserted that the motivation behind the redraw was clearly partisan gain — a position that sits outside the jurisdiction of the court.
Following that ruling, Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, asking for an administrative stay — which Alito granted.
“Compounding the harm, the district court entered its sweeping injunction far too late in the day — ten days after Texas’s candidate filing period had already opened. The injunction changes the boundaries of all but one of the State’s 38 congressional districts, enjoining Texas from using its duly enacted 2025 map and resurrecting the repealed 2021 map,” Texas wrote in its appeal.
“The chaos caused by such an injunction is obvious: campaigning had already begun, candidates had already gathered signatures and filed applications to appear on the ballot under the 2025 map, and early voting for the March 3, 2026, primary was only 91 days away. The lateness of the district court’s injunction (issued 38 days after the hearing) alone warrants a stay.”
As things stand, Texas Republicans’ map is back in effect while the U.S. Supreme Court considers the case in expedited fashion.
Texas’ candidate filing deadline is December 8, 2025.
Twitter/X turns on locations and it turns out a lot of “American” account pushing that “GOP civil war”` nonsense were foreign psyops.
There are thousands of accounts like this. Many of them explicitly claim to be American or Western, but are run by random people in Asia and Africa to sow chaos and get clicks.
BREAKING – Waves of Democrat influencers are being exposed as foreigners under X’s new location update, including leftist X agitator Alex Cole, who claimed he voted for Kamala but has now been revealed to be Canadian. pic.twitter.com/3LrAsYCiMw
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is supposed to be used in extreme cases of humanitarian need for short terms (usually for 6, 12, or 18 months), allowing foreign refugees a safe haven in America.
As deportation efforts have ramped up, however, the American public has learned that some foreigners have remained in the country on TPS for decades. Some politicians and businesses have purposely imported large numbers of foreigners into small American towns, such as Haitians in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as cheap labor to replace Americans.
President Donald Trump’s initiative to eliminate government waste and fraud through a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has quietly disbanded with a full 8 months still left on its charter.
Earlier this month when Reuters asked Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor about the status of DOGE, Kupor replied, “That doesn’t exist.”
Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) said that Elon Musk, who headed up the DOGE effort, was pushed out Washington D.C. because he was getting too close to exposing corrupt officials who are enriching themselves through dark money non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Burchett told Benny Johnson, “NGO money pours into Washington and ends up in politicians’ pockets as dark money.”
DOGE had made dramatic impact on the federal government during the early months of Trump’s second term, shrinking the size of federal agencies and cutting their budgets or revealing astonishing amounts of questionable money flowing through NGO coffers.
Sound like a good reason to continue the work, not abandon it…
All that “don’t obey illegal orders” nonsense Democrats are regurgitating? Yeah, it’s Soros-funded, “Sponsored by Win Without War, a progressive advocacy group,” which in turn is funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from congress. As in the NFL, there’s always someone that has to “set the edge,” and MTG was the person who did that in the Trump era.
What the hell? Is China committing war crimes in Philippines coastal waters?
The Philippine Navy recently caught Chinese Fishing Militia putting Cyanide in the water near the BRP Sierra Madre at the Second Thomas Shoal.
The incident that was recorded on camera demonstrates the brutality & destruction meted out by the Chinese Fishing Militia inside… pic.twitter.com/L7NCI0UIik
The apparent reason Armata failed is this: sanctions.
But there’s more to the story, too. In fact, several interlocking factors account for the T-14’s failure to materialize as intended.
Let’s first look at costs and priorities: the unit cost of the T-14 was estimated at several million dollars – far higher than Russia had budgeted for.
The increase in cost meant that it couldn’t actually be sustained at scale. And, faced with heavy losses in Ukraine and urgent demands to ramp up numbers, Moscow opted to modernize its legacy platforms, such as the T-90, rather than invest in an expensive and unproven system. A tough choice, but a logical one.
The domestic production line for the T-14 never actually achieved accurate serial output, in large part thanks to sanctions and industrial bottlenecks.
There was no assembly line. Yes, really: every vehicle was hand-built like a luxury car. Sanctions and supply-chain constraints further hindered the manufacture of key components and high-end electronics required for the platform.
But even if Russia had been able to assemble more of the tanks before the sanctions really kicked in, it might not have changed the reality on the battlefield. Even when the war in Ukraine created a burning need for armored vehicles, Russia hesitated to commit T-14 units to the frontline for one worrying reason: they were vulnerable.
With the rise of automated systems, drone warfare, and long-range combat, those tanks may have proven as vulnerable as older units – and losing tanks built pre-sanctions would mean replacing them with older tanks.
That wouldn’t have made sense.
For more than a decade, the T-14 Armata has embodied Russia’s ambition to leap ahead of the West in tank design and warfare.
But it failed.
The usual lefty sorts are trying to raise Maryland’s minimum wage to $25. Virginia’s minimum wage will be $12.77 in 2026. Which state will businesses choose?
Brown County Judge Shane Britton was suspended from office without pay on Tuesday, one day after he was arrested on multiple charges that included allegations he assaulted a female prosecutor and interfered with the prosecution of a family violence case.
According to indictments handed down by a grand jury last week, Britton has been charged with three felonies: tampering with a witness in a family violence case, assault of a public servant, and tampering with a government document.
To understand the difference, it helps to look at what each chip was originally built to do. A GPU is a “general-purpose” parallel processor, while a TPU is a “domain-specific” architecture.
The GPUs were designed for graphics. They excel at parallel processing (doing many things at once), which is great for AI. However, because they are designed to handle everything from video game textures to scientific simulations, they carry “architectural baggage.” They spend significant energy and chip area on complex tasks like caching, branch prediction, and managing independent threads.
A TPU, on the other hand, strips away all that baggage. It has no hardware for rasterization or texture mapping. Instead, it uses a unique architecture called a Systolic Array.
The “Systolic Array” is the key differentiator. In a standard CPU or GPU, the chip moves data back and forth between the memory and the computing units for every calculation. This constant shuffling creates a bottleneck (the Von Neumann bottleneck).
In a TPU’s systolic array, data flows through the chip like blood through a heart (hence “systolic”).
It loads data (weights) once.
It passes inputs through a massive grid of multipliers.
The data is passed directly to the next unit in the array without writing back to memory.
What this means, in essence, is that a TPU, because of its systolic array, drastically reduces the number of memory reads and writes required from HBM. As a result, the TPU can spend its cycles computing rather than waiting for data.
Google’s new TPU design, also called Ironwood also addressed some of the key areas where a TPU was lacking:
They enhanced the SparseCore for efficiently handling large embeddings (good for recommendation systems and LLMs)
It increased HBM capacity and bandwidth (up to 192 GB per chip). For a better understanding, Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 has 192GB per chip, while Blackwell Ultra, also known as the B300, has 288 GB per chip.
Improved the Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) for linking thousands of chips into massive clusters, also called TPU Pods (needed for AI training as well as some time test compute inference workloads). When it comes to ICI, it is important to note that it is very performant with a Peak Bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s vs Blackwell NVLink 5 at 1.8 TB/s. But Google’s ICI, together with its specialized compiler and software stack, still delivers superior performance on some specific AI tasks.
The key thing to understand is that because the TPU doesn’t need to decode complex instructions or constantly access memory, it can deliver significantly higher Operations Per Joule.
“TPU v6 is 60-65% more efficient than GPUs.”
Austin’s APL bookstore Recycled Reads will be closing in January and the stock distributed to individual library sales shelves. I doubt I’ll be visiting various library branches to book scout. Maybe they should go back to the book sale events they used to hold.
Israel hits Iran, everyone wants to delete illegal aliens, Kamala loses a one-person debate, WaPo refuses to pick Kamala over Hitler, the WNBA continues to bleed cash, and Tim Walz gets his ABBA on. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Reminder: Early voting in Texas is going on now and extends through November 1st, and Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump is tonight.
A new Fox News poll shows that two-thirds of American voters favor deporting illegal aliens—a dramatic increase over the past decade.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made mass deportation a major policy promise throughout his campaign, as the open border policies of the Biden-Harris administration have allowed millions of illegal aliens to enter the U.S.
The October 2024 poll of registered voters shows that support for deportation has increased dramatically since 2015. Among nonwhite voters, 57 percent now support mass deportations, while only 33 percent said they did in 2015.
Additionally, 91 percent of Republicans now say they support deportations—a 21-point increase since 2015. Rural voters’ support has risen by 20 points, urban voters by 19 points, and men’s support increased by 16.
Democrat support for deportations has increased to 42 percent from 34 percent in 2015.
Voters were also asked if they were in favor of allowing illegal aliens who have jobs to apply for legal status. While 68 percent said they were in favor in 2015, it dropped to 58 percent in favor this year.
Another Fox News poll shows that immigration is voters’ second top issue as they head into the November election. The economy is the number one issue for 40 percent of voters, while 17 percent said immigration and 15 percent said abortion.
is out of gas. The weather is choppy, the navigation system completely unreliable, and the best guess is that you’re still short of the runway. (Oh, and the captain had a stroke while in the cockpit a few hours ago, leaving only a flight attendant as the pilot. She refuses to read the instruction manual or listen to the passengers.) Yes, it’s easy enough to spin up lovingly bespoke metaphors for how the Harris campaign is handling the late stages of the 2024 race — a race they very much could still win, I must always emphasize — but I’ll conclude this one by saying that if last night’s Kamala Harris CNN town hall (with Anderson Cooper hosting in the Philadelphia suburbs) is any indication, the plane may already be disintegrating in midair, before it even hits the ground.
You may have noticed that I’ve had a decidedly muted reaction to Harris’s other recent “serious” media interviews, whether Bret Baier at Fox News or Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, in the sense that while Harris was predictably awful in both sit-downs (almost relentlessly so), she was boring and unrevelatory in her awfulness. In other words, we learned nothing new about the depths to which she is capable of sinking performatively that we didn’t already know. They were water-treading exercises for the most part.
Last night’s CNN town hall, on the other hand, was memorably bad. This is the moment her campaign dreaded, the moment when the fundamental emptiness and inadequacy of their candidate was revealed for all the world to see without helpful edits or someone to bail her out. There Harris stood exposed — with an unpersuaded audience and a moderator in Cooper who handled his task without showing any particular solicitude for her electoral fortunes — and she withered in the spotlight. (As Dylan might have said, “Even the vice president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”) There are moments from this event — many moments, oh so terribly many of them — that will haunt Harris in retirement forever should she lose, the sorts of ghastly stammering failures destined to go into YouTube clip reels ten years later explaining “How We Got Here….”
As for myself, I found Harris’s answer to Anderson Cooper’s pointed question about the border fence to be perhaps the lowest moment of her entire public career to date, and I mean that in the specific sense that nobody who watches it — not even her fiercest partisans — will be able to come away from it with anything save a reflex-level revulsion.
I did not have Anderson Cooper cooking Kamala on my bingo card but here we are.
She’s exposed as a total hypocrite here. First the wall was racist, stupid and xenophobic but now that she needs votes she’s pandering. pic.twitter.com/ctk6nmQcvZ
“What was most remarkable about the disaster is how even CNN’s own analysts panned Harris’s performance as well, some with a palpable sense of disgust.”
Some excerpts of that:
NEW: CNN’s Scott Jennings says Kamala Harris is a “double-threat” because she can’t think on her feet and can’t answer the expected questions.
CNN has railed on Harris after her town hall event.
Next, after weeks of courting Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, Harris rejected him for Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota – the state that gave us Gov. Jesse “the body” Ventura and Saturday Night Live’s Al Franken as a U.S. Senator.
Another misstep for Harris. While Shapiro isn’t Biden, he is well known in greater Philadelphia and seems comfortable campaigning in Scranton and towns like it across the state.
It still isn’t clear if Harris rejected Shapiro because he is Jewish and supports Israel’s right to defend itself or because he is a tireless campaigner, well-received on the stump, who might show her up. Did she reject Shapiro because picking him would offend “the Squad” in Congress and endanger the electoral votes of Michigan, home to a large Muslim population? Or did she spurn the Pennsylvania governor because she didn’t want her supporters murmuring: “We should’ve run him?
Harris compounded her mistake by picking Walz, who represents the Democratic Party’s modern left wing. Walz won’t help Harris win votes in Pennsylvania; in fact, he makes it harder. She picked someone who is un-relatable everywhere, from Philadelphia’s neighborhoods to small town and rural Pennsylvania. And, he’s just plain “weird.”
It gets worse. Her message, agenda, and policies are not resonating here.
She has tried to stress that the economy is actually good – “Bidenomics is working,” she maintained. They tried charts, graphs, and “experts.” No one in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods is buying it, especially blacks and Hispanics, who are being crushed by inflation and violent crime.
So Harris pivoted to a new message: she would “fix” the economy and “fight” inflation. Her now comically repeated line about being “raised in a middle-class family” draws blank stares, laughs, or anger, even among some in her usual base.
It’s even worse in rural Pennsylvania, where Walz and “second man” Doug Emhoff tried a “real men for Kamala tour,” complete with ads and Zoom calls about why men should support her.
Then they sent “Elmer Fudd” – aka Walz – out hunting. In newly purchased hunting clothes, using the wrong rifle (plus demonstrating that he didn’t know how to load it), Walz resembled something like King Charles attending the Indianapolis 500.
Harris was against fracking – that is, before she was for it, as she now claims to be. No one in rural Pennsylvania is buying it. Her “values haven’t changed,” as she herself says. Rural Pennsylvanians know that her preferred policy would hurt the economy of northern, central and western Pennsylvania, to say nothing of the national economy and national security.
Democrats want to win Pennsylvania, of course – but they have selected the wrong candidate, through the wrong method. Harris then dug the hole deeper by picking the wrong running mate. And to top it off, they’re running on a misguided, if not delusional, platform.
“Black, Latino, and Asian Trump supporters shout down white, liberal Harris supporters in Lancaster.”
The left-wing, liberal, and Democratic narrative about former President Donald Trump being a racist is falling apart.
For years, labeling Trump as a racist was an integral part of Democrats’ political strategy. It was never really true, mind you. It was just baseless hyperbolic hysteria that was at the foundation of the Democratic political propaganda machine. They have used it against every Republican presidential candidate for the last 40 years.
They used it to brainwash, scare, and manipulate racial minorities and white liberals in the previous two presidential elections, in which Trump was the GOP nominee. They wanted to create a narrative that the only people who supported Trump were a bunch of lowly, uneducated, racist white people. It worked in 2016, and it worked in 2020. It’s not working in 2024.
The sanctimony of white, liberal Democrats is predicated on their unhinged arrogance of moral superiority involving race. The white, liberal Democrats think racial minorities cannot succeed in the United States without white, liberal Democrats saving them. The white, liberal Democrats think they are more intelligent, enlightened, and compassionate than Republicans. So, imagine their surprise when, outside the venue that hosted a town hall for Trump in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, it was black, Latino, and Asian Trump supporters shouting down Vice President Kamala Harris’s white, liberal supporters.
I witnessed, firsthand, white, liberal Harris supporters screaming that Trump is a racist and then demeaning the many black, Latino, and Asian Trump supporters holding Trump signs and wearing MAGA hats and shirts. These smug, arrogant white people were trying to tell racial minorities what was best for them. It was a sight to behold, but not one that has not become commonplace in American society. It was a reflection of just how out of touch with reality white, liberal Harris voters are.
Dominicans for Trump sign holders outside Trump town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Christopher Tremoglie)
The crowd at the town hall was diverse, with a larger-than-expected minority presence, given the tall tales of Harris supporters’ fails regarding diversity and race among Trump supporters. It was immediately noticeable upon arriving at the town hall. Those in attendance were greeted by boisterous Asian Americans waving American flags in front of Trump posters, wearing red MAGA hats, and chanting the name “Trump!”
A few hundred feet away, a group of Dominican Trump voters were cheering for the former president and shouting down anyone who dared insult the GOP nominee. They stood outside the venue holding signs that read “Dominicans for Trump” and “Boricuas for Trump.”
A Harris supporter passed the group and chastised them, asking how they could be a minority and support a racist and a bigot. A person holding a “Boricuas for Trump” sign shouted back at them, asking the white Harris supporter who they thought they were telling a Dominican who to support. The Harris supporter kept walking. Other incidents played out similarly nearby.
Later, this group gathered at a main intersection near the Lancaster Convention Center and engaged in a shouting match with a group of Harris supporters, who had gathered to protest Trump. There did not appear to be any mention of race, just two groups shouting back and forth at each other. However, again, I noticed the Harris supporters were white, and the most vocal Trump supporters were black, Latino, and Asian.
Also: “Initial GOP Early Vote Turnout in Texas Substantially Higher Than 2020 Levels.”
But don’t get cocky! “Schumer-Backed Democratic PAC Makes $5 Million Texas Ad Buy Backing Allred….Schumer’s group, Senate Majority PAC (SMP) had mostly abstained from the Texas race, playing ball in other, seemingly more competitive races like in Ohio and Montana — much to Congressman Colin Allred’s (D-TX-32) chagrin. But clearly the calculus has changed for the group, which has now put substantial skin in the game in Texas.”
The Democratic Party’s election dirty tricks begin. “Montana Dem Operative Caught Tampering With Ballot Box…The operative, Laszlo Gendler, has been paid by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), according to OpenSecrets.org, as Montana Talks reported. The DSCC is attempting to help incumbent Democrat Senator Jon Tester against GOP senatorial candidate Tim Sheehy.”
A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever….
A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.
Michigan inaugurated what it now calls D.E.I. 1.0, it intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then reshaping American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I., convinced that such programs would help attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty.
Today that revolution is under withering attack. Energized by backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and the right-wing campaign against “critical race theory” in public institutions, at least a dozen states have banned or limited D.E.I. programs at public universities. After the Oct. 7 attacks, as campuses across the country erupted with protests against Israel, critics accused D.E.I. programs of fostering antisemitism. In the fever of the 2024 campaign, Republican influencers and politicians have recast D.E.I. as an all-purpose boogeyman — the root cause of defective airplanes, the collapse of a Baltimore bridge and the near-assassination of Donald J. Trump.
But even some of Michigan’s peer institutions have soured on aspects of D.E.I. Last spring, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences said they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity; such “compelled statements,” M.I.T.’s president said, “impinge on freedom of expression.”
Michigan hasn’t joined the retreat. Instead, it has redoubled its efforts, testing the future of an embattled ideal. A year ago, the university inaugurated what it calls D.E.I. 2.0. At Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241, according to figures compiled by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university’s Flint campus and a D.E.I. critic. (The school’s own figures, which count the D.E.I. work force differently, show less growth over time and a much smaller staff as of last year.) When school began in August, brightly colored flags around campus promoted the goals of D.E.I. 2.0.
According to a confidential report I obtained, a committee appointed by Michigan’s provost — and stocked with professors with D.E.I.-related appointments — urged the school this summer to continue using diversity statements in hiring and promotion, arguing that eliminating them “would be seen as a capitulation to the winds of political expediency.”
In many respects, Michigan’s entire D.E.I. initiative can be understood as a sustained act of defiance against such pressures. Nearly two decades ago, voters in Michigan banned racial preferences in university admissions and hiring. When the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action across the land last year — stripping selective colleges of their most powerful tool for building racially diverse classes — Michigan’s president, Santa J. Ono, went on PBS’s “NewsHour” to offer his university as the model for achieving diversity in a post-affirmative action world.
But over months of reporting this year, I found a different kind of backlash building, one that emanated not from Washington or right-wing think tanks but from inside the university’s own dorms and faculty lounges. On Michigan’s largely left-leaning campus, few of the people I met questioned the broad ideals of diversity or social justice. Yet the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.
D.E.I. at Michigan is rooted in a struggle for racial integration that began more than a half-century ago, but many Black students today regard the school’s expansive program as a well-meaning failure. The university now has a greater proportion of Hispanic, Asian and first-generation students and a more racially diverse staff. But in a state where 14 percent of residents are Black, the school’s Black undergraduate enrollment has long hovered stubbornly at around 4 percent, before ticking up just past 5 percent this fall. (The figures are slightly higher if, as school officials strongly urged, you include students who identify as more than one race.) …
Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.
Social Justice is racist garbage that destroys everything it touches.
'We must not publish a study that says we're harming children because people who say we're harming children will use the study as evidence that we're harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.' pic.twitter.com/hS4CcswkXg
Hezbollah launches a drone attack against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house, though they cause no injuries. Honestly, this is a huge step up from their usual targeting of women and children, as a country’s political leaders are a legitimate war target.
“Half of Millennials and Gen Z homeowners are, quote, trapped in their starter homes, which are now losing tens of thousands in value thanks to the same Federal Reserve that put them in a housing hell to begin with.”
Ammo.com sent over a report on defensive gun use in the U.S. “Although many dispute the plausibility of more than one million DGUs yearly, it is entirely plausible. With millions of gun owners in the U.S. and millions of unreported crimes, more civilians likely stop threats than are harmed by them. Furthermore, states with permitless carry and stand-your-ground laws experience reduced violent crime rates. Therefore, armed civilians are, at least, not a danger to society.”
Another one. “North Texas Teacher Arrested for Sexual Relationship With Former Student. Carroll ISD middle school teacher Angela Barnes was charged with sexual assault of a child and improper relationship between an educator and student.”
Lin Chen pleaded guilty in federal court today to illegally exporting U.S. technology to a prohibited end user in China, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). The plea was accepted by the Hon. William Alsup, Senior U.S. District Judge.
In pleading guilty, Chen, 65, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), admitted to acting on behalf of Jiangsu Hantang International Trade Group Corp., Ltd. (JHI), a company headquartered in Nanjing, PRC, to procure a wafer cutting machine on behalf of Chengdu GaStone Technology Co., Ltd. (GaStone), an entity located in Chengdu, PRC. Chen admitted to knowing that GaStone was designated on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List on Aug. 1, 2014. Federal regulations restrict the export of certain items to companies, research institutions, and other entities identified on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List. Under applicable Department of Commerce regulations, wafer cutting machines, which are used to cut thin semiconductors used in electronics (also known as silicon wafers), require a license for export to end-users such as GaStone.
According to the plea agreement, by no later than Dec. 4, 2015, Chen knew that GaStone was prohibited from receiving restricted exports without a license, including a DTX-150 Scribe and Break Machine, a machine for processing silicon wafer microchips. On approximately Dec. 10, 2015, Chen worked with a co-defendant to arrange the sale of a DTX-150 to GaStone by shipping it to the PRC in the name of JHI without an export license from Commerce. Chen used JHI’s status as an intermediary to conceal GaStone as the true end-user of the technology.
That’s a slice-and-dice machine, not some cutting-edge process tech that’s embargoed to China. They might have been able to get that legally by just filling out the proper forms.
The last full-sized Kmart closes. I would say “Thanks, Joe Biden,” but this particular death, thanks to Walmart and Amazon, has been a long time coming.
“WNBA will lose $40 million this season. So naturally the players are thinking of opting out of their labor agreement to ask for more money… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Postcards From Barsoom has an extensive, reasonably compelling case that men gravitate toward jobs that allow them to compete with other men, mainly to impress women, and as become the majority in each of these fields, those particular arenas no longer convey status for achievement, because men do not win status by defeating women. Thus men who enter female-dominated fields for greater access to women are barking up the wrong tree, because even their co-workers will view them as low status. This theory has a certain amount of explanatory power, and posits that the feminization of academia begat social justice, not vice versa, but seems to me to be too totalizing an explanation for our current woes. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
All those “new jobs” created in the Biden Recession have gone to illegal aliens, two Trump court cases appear to be in the process of derailment, more Hunter Biden shenanigans come to light, a whole lot of anniversaries this week, and a chance to own the Ark of the Covenant! It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The first Wall Street analyst daring to point out that the employment emperor is naked, is Standard Chartered’s global head of macro, Steve Englander who in a note titled simply enough “Immigration leading to labor-market surge” [writes] that according to his estimates “undocumented immigrants account for half of job growth in FY24 so far” (the actual number is far higher but we understand his initial conservatism), and adds that “asylum seekers and humanitarian parolees explain the surge in undocumented immigrants” before concluding that the continued rise in EAD approvals likely will extend strong employment growth in 2024. In other words, “strong employment growth” for American citizens, always was and remains a fabulation, and the only job growth in the US is for illegals, who will work for below minimum wage, which also explains why inflation hasn’t spiked in the past year as millions of illegals were hired.
How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C
Does a mistrial loom in the Trump kangaroo court case? Seems like a juror celebrating a guilty verdict before the trial was over on Facebook is yet another reason to throw out the conviction…
Speaking kangaroo Trump prosecutions, the Georgia Court of Appeals has ordered that case halted until the Fani Willis conflict of interest issue is resolved.
In other court news, in Hunter Biden’s defense just blew up.
Hunter’s defense, carefully crafted by attorney Abbe Lowell during his opening statement on Tuesday, was blown up by the testimony of an ex-girlfriend and ex-wife who described the extent of Hunter’s crack-cocaine usage around the time he purchased a firearm in October 2018 — and by the salesman who sold Hunter the gun he allegedly lied in order to purchase.
Hunter is facing two federal charges related to his allegedly lying about his drug addiction on a gun-purchase background-check form and he faces a third charge for allegedly possessing the firearm while addicted to crack cocaine. Hunter pleaded not guilty to the charges last year and faces up to 25 years in prison.
Most of the day was taken up by testimony from Hunter Biden’s ex-girlfriend Zoe Kestan, a woman who dated Biden from roughly December 2017 to November 2018, despite being half his age at the time.
Prosector Leo Wise conducted a lengthy direct examination of Kestan accompanied by pictures from her cellphone to corroborate her recollection of events.
Wise and Kestan seemed to get into a rhythm throughout the direct examination, as Kestan recalled large events and small details from her time with Hunter Biden. Kestan remembered exact dates and named the various hotels they stayed at during their time together.
Each time Kestan described an experience with Hunter Biden, Wise asked her if Hunter Biden smoked crack at their hotel or Airbnb, and Kestan always replied affirmatively.
“Every 20 minutes or so,” Kestan said of Hunter Biden’s crack habit during one of the hotel stays. She noted that he smoked crack less frequently in public, and she never noticed a change in his demeanor when he smoked.
Wise shared photos from Kestan’s cellphone showing drug paraphernalia scatted around the bathrooms and tables of their lodgings. One of the images appeared to show Biden in a hotel bathtub holding a crack pipe in the wee hours of the morning. When Wise showed the images, Kestan easily pointed out the drug paraphernalia and explained to the courtroom how the various materials were used to cook and consume crack.
Biden allowed Kestan to withdraw cash from his account when he needed to spend it on drugs, she recounted. Kestan stated the names of drug dealers and described the drug transactions she saw at the hotels and other locations.
Kestan’s testimony and the images allowed Wise to establish that Hunter was smoking crack in September 2018, following his late August rehab stint in Malibu, Calif. She said Biden smoked crack every 20 minutes at a Malibu house he rented, and she did not remember Biden discussing his rehab stint during her time at the house in September 2018.
Wise closed the direct examination by introducing a lengthy text message Biden sent her in December 2018 lamenting how he would always be a drug addict and his attempts to get sober failed.
And this is “the smartest guy” Joe Biden knows…
Also from Hunter’s weapons case, he was caught on tape bragging about how he could score crack in Timbuktu. Which is a neat trick, since it’s an Islamic majority city in Mali, Africa, and is currently under siege by Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, a jihadist organization which has incorporated elements formally loyal to both al Qaeda and the Islamic State. To be fair to the crackhead, he apparently said this before the siege was imposed last year…
Also, I would like to apologize to readers for not knowing about the siege and doing at least a LinkSwarm post to it. So much news, so little time..
On Friday, Mayor John Whitmire and outgoing Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced seven people have been indicted for 14 public corruption felonies ranging from abuse of official capacity to tampering with evidence. The charges are related to a scheme surrounding the City of Houston’s water repair contracts.
Patrece Lee, the lead defendant, and a former city employee, had access to $80 million of city funds for emergency waterline repair.
In the Summer and Fall of 2022, Lee was in a position to recommend vendors for contracts with the City of Houston public works department to repair the water lines. Lee allegedly made agreements with companies to have them hire her as a “consultant” to receive a kickback in exchange for expedited payments and bigger contracts. She also targeted less experienced companies and offered her services to help them “get paid faster, or to get bigger and better contracts in the future” as well.
Lee allegedly received roughly $320,000 in payments from that scheme and then steered contracts to a company owned by her brother, allowing them to be paid more than $400,000 of which she immediately transferred $380,000 to her own company. The total amount she stole from the city was $700,000.
“The cooperation that we’ve received from this administration stands in stark contrast to the last seven years,” said Ogg.
The issue was uncovered during Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration. However, he planned to have it handled as an internal civil or administrative matter rather than refer it to the district attorney for criminal prosecution.
If Kim Ogg would actually go after government corruption (and real criminals) while she’s a lame duck DA, that would be a nice silver lining to the clouds of Houston/Harris County’s soft on crime Democratic leadership.
The Houston conman who pretended to be a rabbi. “The man accused of spending $15,000 on a dead woman’s credit card has a long history of fraud, according to police, court records and his family. Police say Dustin Mitchell, who goes by Dustin Cohen, posed as a Rabbi, lawyer and possibly a cop to defraud people. They also say they think he spray-painted anti-semitic vandalism on his own truck.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
…and the 20th anniversary of Killdozer. The event, not the great Theodore Sturgeon short story or the medicore TV movie made from it.
Speaking of D-Day, Biden just plagiarized Reagan’s speech.
Joe Biden essentially plagiarized Ronald Reagan’s famous 1984 speech at Pointe du Hoc today in Normandy. Watch these clips side by side. Wow: pic.twitter.com/jeGgTS2Nnm
The usual fuzzy-headed leftist types are trying to argue for a false moral equivalence between Benjamin Netanyahu, the elected Likud leader of Israel that leftists hate because he’s friendly with Republicans and thwarted Obama’s attempts to defeat him, and Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. Never mind that Netanyahu has never celebrated beheading babies.
Since this moral idiocy pops up time and time again, let us once again explicate the obvious: Hamas isn’t just in favor of “liberating Palestine” (i.e., destroying the state of Israel), or even simply of slaughtering every Israeli. Hamas, by charter, deed, and statement, explicitly seeks the death of all Jews on earth.
First, lets look at the Hamas’ original 1988 charter, which makes no secret of it’s goal of worldwide genocide against the Jews.
This Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), clarifies its picture, reveals its identity, outlines its stand, explains its aims, speaks about its hopes, and calls for its support, adoption and joining its ranks. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.
The struggle is not against Israelis or “Zionists,” it’s against Jews.
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
Note that those trees crying out for Jews to be killed are not limited to Palestine.
Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. “May the cowards never sleep.”
The Islamic Resistance Movement consider itself to be the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism and a step on the road. The Movement adds its efforts to the efforts of all those who are active in the Palestinian arena. Arab and Islamic Peoples should augment by further steps on their part; Islamic groupings all over the Arab world should also do the same, since all of these are the best-equipped for the future role in the fight with the warmongering Jews.
Etc.
Hamas revised their charter in 2016 to cut down on the Jew hatred, but the die was already cast, and taqiyya (deception) is not just allowed in Islamic doctrine, but is obligatory in the struggle of jihad against Dar al Harb (i.e., the House of War against non-Muslims).
How about Fathi Hamad, the political leader of Hamas? “Seven million Palestinians outside, enough warming up, you have Jews with you in every place. You should attack every Jew possible in all the world and kill them.”
Or this journalist who interviewed several Hamas officials. “They never refer to Israelis, they always refer to the Jews. Their plan is to kill all the Jews. All the Jews are the ones they want to wipe out.”
This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas’s political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel. Israel is more than a mere occupier or oppressor in this narrative, it is a rebellion against God and the divinely-ordained trajectory of history. And by showing Israelis in their weakness, the thinking goes, Israelis are somehow actually made weak. Redemption requires only the faith of its believers to be fulfilled, and seeing is believing.
The footage from Saturday, the snuff videos shared gleefully by Hamas supporters, including in some Western far-left circles, weren’t an aberration. Hamas gunmen didn’t get “carried away,” as some explained. They were the essence of the whole enterprise. They were Hamas’s basic message to Israelis: That they weren’t being killed and kidnapped just for tactical advantage in the struggle for Palestinian independence, but rather were being humiliated and dehumanized as traitors against God.
What other penalty can prescribed for literal treason against the will of God but death?
This is why Hamas and their jihadist fellow-travelers believe that every Jew everywhere must be exterminated.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden not just dropping, but deflating and throwing away the ball on border security, Andrew Cuomo finally behaves badly enough for the MSM to notice, and some tidbits about hacking attacks.
Biden’s proposed budget wants to cutting funding for border security…by 96%:
His administration has presented Congress with a Department of Homeland Security budget proposal that calls for slashing spending on what it calls “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” by 96%.
In fiscal year 2021, Congress approved $1,513,000,000 in funding for border security assets and infrastructure. Biden is now asking that Congress approve just $54,315,000 for fiscal year 2022. That is a reduction of $1,458,685,000—or 96.4%.
What exactly is Biden cutting?
Biden’s DHS has presented Congress with a 562-page “overview” of its fiscal year 2022 budget proposal for Customs and Border Protection. The explanation for its “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” plan is presented on pages 326 through 350 of this document.
The presentation divides “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” into six categories: Integrated Fixed Towers; Remote Video Surveillance Systems; Mobile Video Surveillance System; MVSS-M2S2 Modular Mobile Surveillance System; Border Security Assets and Infrastructure End Items; and Border Wall System Program.
In the past two fiscal years—as reported in Biden’s proposal—the Border Wall System Program has been the most significant of these. “This investment,” it says, “includes real estate and environmental planning, land acquisition, wall system design, construction, and construction and oversight of a physical barrier system.”
In fiscal year 2020, it received $1,375,000,000. In fiscal year 2021, it received the same amount.
Now, if Biden gets his way, the federal government will not spend one penny in fiscal year 2022 on planning or constructing a “physical barrier system” at the border.
Obviously, Democrats want a massive influx of illegal aliens so they can amnesty them and have them vote for Democrats. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
As illegal aliens are still being allowed to cross Texas’ open border, U.S. Border Patrol has reportedly reassigned all hands from “apprehending” to “processing.” A former federal agent says these massive waves of illegal aliens are one of the “biggest sources” of rising cases of the Chinese coronavirus and advises Texans to contact all their state officials to stop illegal crossings at the border.
Victor Avila, a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, has previously told Texas Scorecard that federal and state officials aren’t making serious efforts to stop illegal aliens from crossing the border. He said the number of illegal border crossings has recently skyrocketed.
On Tuesday, Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith (R) told Texas Scorecard that U.S. Border Patrol informed him they had been given new orders. “They’ve all been reassigned to processing,” Smith said. “None of them are actually going to be enforcing the border.” Avila commented, “That is what I’m hearing exactly.”
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe described processing as “paperwork, documentation, etc.”
“We’re in a bad spot now,” Smith said. “Texas is on its own.”
Speaking of border security: “Texas landowner fears for kids’ safety amid worsening border crisis, says they can’t play outside anymore.”
“More Illegal Immigrants, Border Agents Testing Positive for COVID-19.” The way Democrats love expanding governemnt in the name of fighting Flu Manchu, you wonder if this is a bug or a feature… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans released their report on COVID-19’s origins, pointing to evidence of a lab leak, genetic modification, and a cover-up, making the case the virus accidentally emerged from the Wuhan lab in August or September 2019.” Or pretty much what every conservative blogger has been saying for almost a year and a half…
This week’s Democratic political scandal de jour is an official state probe of New York Governor Andrew “Granny Killer” Cuomo committed multiple instances of sexual harassment. “These interviews and pieces of evidence revealed a deeply disturbing yet clear picture: Gov. Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of federal and state laws,” said State Attorney General Letitia James. It would be ironic if it was this rather than killing some 15,000 elderly New Yorkers by putting Flu Manchu cases in nursing homes that brought Cuomo down.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, once widely celebrated for leading New York out of the coronavirus pandemic’s darkest days, is now embroiled in crisis over how many of the state’s nursing home residents died because of the virus and an apparent effort to hide the true toll.
Beginning last spring, Mr. Cuomo was criticized over a state requirement that forced nursing homes to take back residents who had been hospitalized with Covid-19 once they recovered. Critics said the policy had increased the number of virus-related deaths among nursing home residents.
At the time, Mr. Cuomo and his aides dismissed the outcry as politically motivated, and in July, the State Health Department released a report that found the policy was not responsible for an increase. The report did, however, raise questions in some quarters about how the state was reporting deaths.
In January, New York’s attorney general said the administration had undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand. Mr. Cuomo later acknowledged as much, blaming the lower figure on fears that the Trump administration would use the data as a political weapon.
“Don’t you see? We had to lie to you, because Orange Man Bad!”
The suggestion that the actual death count had been covered up intensified criticism of Mr. Cuomo, including from his allies in state government. The scandal deepened after reports that the governor’s aides had altered the July report to hide the true figure.
In April, The New York Times reported that Mr. Cuomo’s aides had gone to far greater lengths than previously known to obscure the death toll, repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months.
First, there was the nursing-home scandal, in which Governor Cuomo deliberately undercounted the number of seniors who died due to his directive placing COVID-positive residents back into understaffed, underequipped nursing homes — and then misled New Yorkers and federal officials about it. Estimates suggest that as many as 15,000 New York seniors due to his actions. Worse yet, while covering up these deaths, he took a cool $5.1 million to write a book touting his COVID leadership and then allegedly used state staff and resources to produce this propaganda piece. One needn’t be a skeptic to link the timing of the deal to the cover-up of the scandal.
And that’s just one of the many fires engulfing the Cuomo administration. At this point, it’s hard to keep up with the litany of abuses perpetrated by Governor Cuomo and his staff. Despite anointing himself as a champion of women, Cuomo has been hit with more than ten accusations of sexual harassment since December. First, he said he’d investigate these allegations himself. When public pressure forced him to establish independent investigations of the charges, he stalled for time and declined to comment while the investigations played out. Now, with a Democratic state attorney general investigating the claims, the governor and his top aides have stonewalled, threatened, and gaslit witnesses and state officials, accusing them of playing political games.
There have also been reports that Cuomo’s friends, family, and donors received preferential access to COVID-19 tests and health information. There’s the matter of a $62 million COVID-related state contract being given to a medical network that donated $230,000 to the Cuomo campaign. There’s the claim by gaming interests that the governor’s team threatened them until they coughed up campaign money. And another investigation is centered around allegations that a top Cuomo aide linked vaccine access to political support of the governor.
In an attempt to silence these stories, the governor has responded with brute force. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is on the record as saying Governor Cuomo hurls invective at officials and the media to make them feel “belittled.” Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim — who lost a close family member to COVID in a New York nursing home — called for Cuomo to provide answers about the nursing-home tragedy. Cuomo personally phoned Kim and threatened to “destroy” him, before holding a press conference in which Kim was referred to as a “habitual liar.” Democratic state senator Alessandra Biaggi has released text messages showing threats she’s received from the Cuomo administration.
The behavior displayed by Governor Cuomo is appalling, but it’s nothing new. This is who he is, and who he has always been.
More ethical lapses snipped.
The obvious lies, the ham-fisted cover-ups, the corruption — we’ve seen it all time and time again from this governor. When there’s even a hint of an investigation into wrongdoing that implicates him or his cabal, Cuomo cuts his losses and scorches the earth. This is who he is: a mean-spirited bully with a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, ruthless in defense of his own venal interests and public image.
The Cuomo administration has run the gamut of travesties and tragedies. Personal viciousness is the governor’s calling card, and criminal behavior his M.O. Even as they’re barraged with one scandal and outrageous revelation after another, he and his inner circle continue to operate as though it’s all business as usual. So why is Cuomo still the governor of New York? Democratic lawmakers — the very same ones who called on him to resign when the sexual-harassment claims first emerged — continue to stand with him and normalize his behavior more than seven months later, partially out of fear and partially out of a complete lack of interest in governing.
Meanwhile, Cuomo seems locked into the Ralph Northam strategy: Assume that the (D) after his name absolves him of all sins against Social Justice and just wait out the storm confident no one will dare hold him accountable for his actions. And don’t forget the media’s nonstop fluffing of Cuomo back in 2020:
The Rolling Stone cover; Politico declaring him a “social media superstar”; Harry Enten of CNN declaring that, “The rise of Cuomo shows that times of tragedy can make very unlikely political heroes”; Carl Bernstein declaring that, “[It’s] real leadership of the kind the president of the United States should have provided to the American people throughout this crisis, but hasn’t”; Jesse McKinley and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo’s handling of the crisis has fostered a nationwide following; Mr. Biden called Mr. Cuomo’s briefings a ‘lesson in leadership,’ and others have described them as communal therapy sessions”; Ben Smith of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo has emerged as the executive best suited for the coronavirus crisis”; the New York Post (!) declaring that New York women were developing crushes on him; and Jen Rubin gushing: “Watching Andrew Cuomo is inspiring, uplifting, fascinating. He weaves details and humor and math and common sense all together. He is magnificent.” Even the Columbia Journalism Review started to worry that the adoring tone of the coverage was overlooking real problems with Cuomo’s decision-making.
And this is all separate from his appearances on his brother’s CNN program. I suspect you remember or can find examples I didn’t list above. Oh, another classic example, from Rebecca Fishbein of Jezebel: “I swooned when he told a reporter he had his own workout routine. I have watched a clip of him and brother Chris Cuomo bickering about their mother at least 20 times. I think I have a crush?”
Democrats in Washington want Andrew Cuomo to resign to allow the Democrat lieutenant governor to run New York state. If a Republican were next in line for the job, Democrats would be falling on grenades for Cuomo. That is, after all, what happened in Virginia when Governor Black Face unleashed his oppo research on the Democrats in the line of succession.
There are no criminal charges against Cuomo.
Cuomo’s problem is not sexual harassment. His problem is Democrats see him as a threat if he chooses to run for president.
Democrats in Washington want no part of playing second fiddle to an outsider. They had their fill of outsiders as presidents with Bill Clinton. Democrat senators want the White House all to themselves. In the 6 presidential elections since Clinton, Democrats have nominated a senator or former senator for president and vice president each time.
National Review wants you to know that Huey Long was a bad role model. Or you could just, you know, watch All the King’s Men, which remains a timeless classic. It won the Oscar in back-to-back years with All About Eve, another timeless classic, both of which showed you what the old studio system could achieve when they were working at the top of their game.
Inside the fight against a ransomware attack against the Texas town of Borger (which is way the hell up north of Amarillo):
In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.
Gibberish ransom demands spat out of printers and displayed on some computer screens. Government files were encrypted, with titles like “Budget Document” replaced by nonsensical combinations of letters and symbols, said current city manager Garrett Spradling.
Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.
One update shared with city officials soon after the attack described how every server was infected, as were about 60% of the 85 computers inspected by that point. A city government email told council members that agendas for a meeting would be in paper format, “since your tablets won’t be able to connect.” An official told a judge it was unclear if computer systems would be operational in time for trials two days away.
Because the city had paid for offsite remote backup, Borger had the capability to reformat servers, reinstall the operating system and bring data back over. A newly purchased server that had yet to be installed came in handy. The police department, however, retained its data locally and the attack hampered officers’ access to previous incident reports, Spradling said.
Expensive Ivy League college film degrees are a scam. “Recent graduates from the Columbia University film program have an average loan debt of six figures against a low-to-mid five-figure income. And given that the master’s program takes four years, Columbia alumni enter the competitive field at around age 30, a detrimentally late start. Graduates soon face the shocking realization that they not only crippled their future but also wasted their money and youth.”
Automotive News published a report on Thursday of this week noting that EVs were 2.3 times more expensive to service than ICE vehicles after three months of ownership. Analytics firm We Predict compiled the data by looking at roughly 19 million vehicles between the 2016 and 2021 model years.
That figure drops to just 1.6 times more expensive after one year, the report noted, as a result of a 77% drop in maintenance costs and a decline in repair costs. The data showed that service techs spend about twice as much time diagnosing problems with EVs as they do with regular gas vehicles. They spend about 1.5 times longer fixing them and the labor rate for repairs was about 1.3 times higher.
Presumably some of this gap will drop as technicians become more familiar with them.
Classical music is under racial attack. Orchestras and opera companies are said to discriminate against black musicians and composers. The canonical repertoire—the product of a centuries-long tradition of musical expression—is allegedly a function of white supremacy.
Not one leader in the field has defended Western art music against these charges. Their silence is emblematic. Other supposed guardians of Western civilization, whether museum directors, humanities professors, or scientists, have gone AWOL in the face of similar claims, lest they themselves be denounced as racist.
Also this: “Orchestras should hire diversity consultants to develop ‘extra-musical evaluation’ criteria for orchestral positions, such as serving as an institutional spokesman.” Diversity consultants always demand hiring more diversity consultants. What are the odds?
The Offspring fire longtime drummer Pete Parada for refusing to get a Flu Manchu vaccine. “Given my personal medical history and the side-effect profile of these jabs, my doctor has advised me not to get a shot at this time.” If the other members are vaccinated, why the hell should they care? Stupider still: Parada already caught the virus last year, so he probably has more immunity than the vaccine provides…
Col. Dave Severance, who helped take Iwo Jima (and commanded the second flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, the one in the famous photograph), dead at 102.
Where does this rank among disturbing YouTube videos? I give it a three.
What better Sunday viewing fodder than tanks, Walt Disney, and Hitler in Hell?
That’s just the beginning of the full video, which gives more technical detail and instructions on how to use the rifle:
The Boys Mark 1 antitank rifle was based on an .50 BMG cartridge upped to a .55 projectile, and was the primary anti-tank weapon available to the British Commonwealth at the outbreak of World War II. Could it actually take out German Panzers?
Eh. Sort of. Briefly.
The Mark II variant bullet was capable of penetrating “0.91 inches (23.2 mm) of armor at 100 yd (91 m).” So it could theoretically take out Panzer Is and IIs. But Panzer IIIs, starting with the Ausf. D version in 1938, had at least 30mm armor, so they were already useless against German medium tanks when the war began. So it was pretty much obsolete when the Walt Disney video was made.
Here’s Ian McCollum talking about the rifle:
And here he is firing it:
And finally, because of the name of the rifle, and because it’s my blog, and because why the hell not:
Yesterday marked the 80th Anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, AKA The Hitler-Stalin Pact, AKA The Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The evil that men do tends to live on long after they’re gone, and such is the case with Hitler, Stalin, Molotov and Ribbentrop. The anti-Israeli left is constantly demanding that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders (which ain’t gonna happen), but seems distinctly disinclined to protest the territorial expansion engendered by a treaty between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s National Socialist Germany (you know, the real Hitler, not the imaginary simulacrum of same that seems to dwell in so many left-wing heads). Not only did the Soviets get to carve up Poland with Hitler without suffering postwar consequences, but many of the territorial changes wrought by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact continued to live on after World War II:
Given Stalin’s greenlight, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union itself invaded Poland September 17. The land Poland lost to Nazi Germany was restored to it (plus additional formerly German territory such as Danzing/Gdansk and land east of the Oder–Neisse line) at the Potsdam conference. Not only did Poland not receive the land the Soviet Union conquered, it had to cede additional land to Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Poland lost over 28,000 square miles of territory.
Assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence by the pact, the free Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union against their will. The nations would spend half a century suffering under communist domination before declaring themselves independent once again just ahead of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Finland, assigned to the Soviet sphere by the pact, would find itself invaded by the Soviet Union on November 30, 1939. Unlike the overwhelmed Poles, the Finns tore the Soviets a new asshole in the Winter War, and after three and half months of fighting in this frozen hell, and losing over 100,000 men (500 at the hands of legendary Finnish sniper Simo Hayha alone), the Soviets agreed to a Finnish peace proposal that left them with about 10% of Finland’s prewar territory.
Romania would be forced to cede various territory to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. (Romania would ally with Nazi Germany against the Soviets, then switch sides in 1944.)
One of the tragedies of World War II was that Stalin got to keep the ill-gotten gains of his alliance with Hitler because the other allies were in no position to push the Red Army out of central and eastern Europe in 1945.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Absent from this roundup is who really got National Security Advisor Mike Flynn axed, because there’s not enough time in the world to read all those links…
“If a border wall stopped a small fraction of the illegal immigrants who are expected to come in the next decade, the fiscal savings from having fewer illegal immigrants in the country would be sufficient to cover the costs of the wall.”
The Democrats have not done the kind of self reflection that they should have, starting in 2010. And I was talking about this in the ’10 elections. You’ve lost white working people, you’ve lost flyover land, and you saw in this election what happens when people get frustrated enough that they say, ‘I’m not going to take this Aristocracy.’ You know Bernie’s a good friend of mine, Bernie can talk about Aristocracies all he wants.
You know, the fact that you’ve made money doesn’t make you a member of that philosophy. Look at Franklin Roosevelt. But there is an Aristocracy now that pervades American politics, it’s got to be broken somehow, in both parties, and I think that’s what the Trump message was that echoed so strongly in these flyover communities.
One wonders if Webb was using “flyover country” for emphasis, or if Democrats actually use “flyover country” seriously when taking amongst themselves. If so, they might add that to the list of reasons middle America hates Democratic coastal elites…
This Politico piece on thinkers that have influenced Steve Bannon (and thus President Trump) is neither to be taken entirely at face value, nor dismissed out of hand. It includes mention of Curtis Yarvin AKA Mencius Moldbug AKA “the Urbit guy” that Social Justice Warriors keep trying to keep from speaking, as well as the author of the much-cited “Flight 93 Election” manifesto. They’re interesting thinkers, but I rather doubt they’re at the center of Trump’s political ideas.
Over 100 rioters from President Trump’s inauguration indicted on rioting charges.
Prominent Jewish Democrats are increasing uneasy with Keith Ellison as DNC chair. “‘It’s almost like the Democrats want to entirely destroy their party,’ [Democratic New York state assemblyman Dov] Hikind said. ‘When someone like Ellison can be a leading candidate to be the head of a major party, we’re in a lot of trouble.'”
Pro-Palestinian reporter changes his mind after living in Israel for 18 months:
Before I moved to Jerusalem, I was very pro-Palestinian. Almost everyone I knew was. I grew up Protestant in a quaint, politically correct New England town; almost everyone around me was liberal. And being liberal in America comes with a pantheon of beliefs: You support pluralism, tolerance and diversity. You support gay rights, access to abortion and gun control.
The belief that Israel is unjustly bullying the Palestinians is an inextricable part of this pantheon. Most progressives in the US view Israel as an aggressor, oppressing the poor noble Arabs who are being so brutally denied their freedom.
Snip.
IT WASN’T until the violence became personal that I began to see the Israeli side with greater clarity. As the “Stabbing Intifada” (as it later became known) kicked into full gear, I traveled to the impoverished East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan for a story I was writing.
As soon as I arrived, a Palestinian kid who was perhaps 13 years old pointed at me and shouted “Yehud!” which means “Jew” in Arabic. Immediately, a large group of his friends who’d been hanging out nearby were running toward me with a terrifying sparkle in their eyes. “Yehud! Yehud!” they shouted. I felt my heart start to pound. I shouted at them in Arabic “Ana mish yehud! Ana mish yehud!” (“I’m not Jewish, I’m not Jewish!”) over and over. I told them, also in Arabic, that I was an American journalist who “loved Palestine.” They calmed down after that, but the look in their eyes when they first saw me is something I’ll never forget. Later, at a house party in Amman, I met a Palestinian guy who’d grown up in Silwan. “If you were Jewish, they probably would have killed you,” he said.
Snip.
Even the kindest, most educated, upper-class Palestinians reject 100 percent of Israel ‒ not just the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. They simply will not be content with a two-state solution ‒ what they want is to return to their ancestral homes in Ramle and Jaffa and Haifa and other places in 1948 Israel, within the Green Line. And they want the Israelis who live there now to leave. They almost never speak of coexistence; they speak of expulsion, of taking back “their” land.
Gay liberal New York writer does even-handed profile of Milo…and is instantly ostracized. “I realized that, for the first time in my adult life, I was outside of the liberal bubble and looking in. What I saw was ugly, lock step, incurious and mean-spirited.”
The MSM lose their minds when Trump lets outlets other than themselves ask questions.
The media spends months complaining Trump won’t let them ask question, then complains when he does because they don’t like the answers.
The New York Times is very upset President Trump is fighting back. “The constant Moonbat attacks on Trump are one of the reasons Trump won. And Trump knows that the vast majority of the media, which votes Democrat and allows their person political beliefs to color all their coverage, will never give him a chance and or honest coverage so why not fight back?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Iran is dying, and no one knows it better than Vladimir Putin, who worked successfully to raise Russia’s fertility rate, unlike Iran’s theocrats, who have failed to persuade Iranians to have children.
Russia’s relationship to the only Shi’ite state of significance is less an alliance than a dalliance, motivated by Moscow’s fear of Sunni radicalism and its desire to establish a strategic beachhead in the Middle East.
But Iran is a depreciating asset whose value will disappear within a 20-year horizon. The question is not whether, but at what price Russia will trade it away.
Snip.
First, Iran may well become the first country in the world that will get old before it gets rich. Its fertility rate (the number of live births over the lifetime of an average woman) fell from 7 in 1979 to perhaps 1.7 today.
That produced an enormous generation of people now in their 20s to 40s who have very few children. As this generation ages, the proportion of Iranians over the age of 60 will soar from about 7% today to around 40% by mid-century.
Other countries face an aging crisis, but with ten times the per capita income: Iran’s nominal GDP per capita is only US$5,300, compared with US$56,000 for the United States, for example.No poor country can care for an elderly population comprising two-fifths of the total. Iran will undergo an economic disaster unprecedented in history. That is baked in the cake, and nothing its government can do will make much different at this late stage.
The year isn’t off to a good start for the Park Slope Food Coop. In January, two members of the venerable Brooklyn institution were accused of stealing more than $18,000 worth of goods. Each had been caught shoplifting once, and when police consulted surveillance tapes, it turned out that the two men (one of whom was 79 years old!) had some seriously sticky fingers.
Snip.
In 2013, The New York Times reported the shop lost $438,000 in stolen items.
But that’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the value that’s recently been lost from the coop’s pension fund. The fund — which is for staff, not members — had been invested in small, speculative companies and racked up two years of losses.
According to the Times, “It appears to have gone into hedge-fund mode years ago, when one co-op member, also a hedge-fund investor, made stock-picking his unpaid job.” Last summer, members were told that the coop had to pour in more than $1 million to keep it flush.
Snip.
In 2011, for instance, coop members were caught paying other people — notably their nannies — to take over their 2-hour-per-week shifts at the market. As it turned out, the well-heeled bankers and lawyers and psychiatrists in the neighborhood who bill several hundred dollars an hour for their time didn’t think rearranging the broccoli was worth it.
Hat tip: Instapundit, who also offers up the following illustration:
Rare book heist in London: “In the early morning hours of January 30, a gang of thieves, in a carefully coordinated scheme, broke into a warehouse near London’s Heathrow airport and made off with over £2 million in rare books. The books, belonging to three different rare book dealers, were being shipped to the United States for the 50th Annual California International Antiquarian Book Fair this past weekend.” Complete list here. (Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
