It’s pretty rare that a four term incumbent senator gets primaried out of office. Indeed, I think you’d have to go back to Alfonse D’Amato defeating Jacob Javits in 1980 for the last time it happened, back when New York was still capable of electing Republicans statewide. So it’s worth taking a deeper look at why John Cornyn got slaughtered by Ken Paxton in Tuesday’s runoff.
And a slaughter it was. Cornyn lost by 384,000 votes, or 27% of people voting. Nor was it a geographical narrow victory for Paxton. Cornyn lost everywhere:
Cornyn won two counties: Liberal, politics-obsessed Travis County, where Cornyn won by just over 2,000 votes, and (as commenter FM noted) rural coastal Kenedy County, the third least populous county in the state with 350 people, where Cornyn won by all of 6 votes to 2. If there’s ever been such a geographically dominant statewide victory in a runoff, I can’t remember it. (Dan Patrick walloped David Dewhurst by a slightly larger margin in the 2014 Lt. Governor runoff, but Dewhurst still won more counties than Cornyn did.)
Some national media has gotten a key fact about the race wrong. No, it was not a dead heat until President Trump endorsed Paxton; polls throughout the runoff constantly showed Paxton ahead by substantial margins. Indeed, between Paxton, Wesley Hunt, and longshot Sara Canady, fully 58% of Republican primary voters cast their ballots against longtime incumbent Cornyn, which should have been a big warning sign.
And if money was truly the only thing that mattered in politics, Cronyn should have mopped the floor with Paxton. Cornyn’s own campaign and allied Super PACs poured more than $100 million into Cornyn’s campaign to no visible effect.
No, the reason that Cornyn lost was because Texas Republicans were finally well and truly tired of him. Cornyn’s playing footsie with illegal alien amnesty while claiming he was against amnesty was one of the biggest reasons voters rejected him.
There’s being rejected by voters, then there’s being absolutely embarrassed.
That’s what we saw in Texas last night. John Cornyn, who outspent his opponent Texas AG Ken Paxton 10-1, was absolutely wrecked at the polls.
No incumbent senator has done worse than Cornyn in half a century, and no other election in U.S. history has seen two incumbent senators voted out in the same election.
Cornyn’s holdout on the SAVE Act, his pro-amnesty leanings, and his refusal to push Trump’s agenda, along with Ken Paxton’s statewide popularity and effectiveness totally sealed the deal.
Funny, Cornyn is a co-sponsor of the SAVE Act, but didn’t make himself conspicuous by trying to get the senate to actually pass it.
Senate Republicans had two options to save Cornyn:
1) Pass the SAVE Act 2) Blow $100 million on a primary election
Why they chose door number two is beyond me. As long as I can remember the NRSC has made decisions that are at odds with voters and reality. https://t.co/D3g54xEiBS
The population of Hidalgo County, Texas, is almost 100% Hispanic. Like many other similar counties, it had heavy support for Paxton.
While the number of Hispanics who voted in this primary was only in the tens of thousands, the fact that they supported the pro-deportation candidate even more than white voters is an important data point.
If you spend any time with Hispanic Americans, you will know that they hate people who cheat the system with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. I am told this makes them racist.
In a not-so different time and age, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) would still be considered one of the good guys: As a pro-life conservative who voted with President Donald Trump 99.2% of the time, just a generation earlier, he would’ve been lauded as one of our most staunchly conservative, reliably Republican senators.
And not just reliably Republican: He’s reliably a winner, too. Sen. Cornyn hadn’t lost an election in 42 years.
Yet last night, this four-term senator with a 42-year winning streak was smooshed like a bug, winning just 36% of the vote in his Republican primary runoff. Nearly two-thirds of his constituents rejected him!
Just like that, his political career is over. No second acts, no chance for redemption.
GOP politicians beware: The rules for Republican Party membership ain’t what they once were. Violate the new rules at your own peril.
But don’t look to the mainstream media to explain the new rules. Reductive, knee-jerk journalists can’t see beyond the Great Orange Monster, interpreting Cornyn’s fate — as well as Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and a slew of Indiana state senators — as the umpteenth sign that Trump is a dictator/fascist/authoritarian.
Examples snipped.
The mainstream media defines “bipartisanship” as Republicans crossing the aisle to help Democrats. But when Democrats cross the aisle to help Republicans, they’re sellouts and traitors.
Case in point: Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.). Because he’ll occasionally side with Republicans, he’s a Judas to the Donkeys.
Snip.
Today, we expect a Republican district will send a loyal, dependable Republican representative to Washington. Helping our GOP “team” is considered part of the job. And given how narrow the margins are, we’re unwilling to sacrifice a roster spot for someone who refuses to play ball.
It’s a luxury we can no longer afford.
Congressmen and senators aren’t simply judged by how much pork they can peddle. Not anymore — that’s as out-of-fashion as parachute pants, Wham! records, and the mullet. Instead, they’re judged by how effectively they help their “team” advance the national football.
That’s because the Democratic Party has changed. Until the Obama years, it was a coalition party: liberals, unions, Catholics, environmentalists, blue-collar workers, minorities, and women. Post-Obama, it became a vehicle for left-wing radicalism — and this alone became its North Star.
Not compromise. Not meeting in the middle. Its stated goal was “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
Which made conservative compromise an impossibility.
The Republican Party and the Democratic Party have evolved to address each other’s deficiencies. It was probably inevitable: The political marketplace demanded it, because they’re competing products.
So, when one party changes, so must the other:
As the Democrats have embraced socialism, Wokeism, and trans/LGBTQ policies, Republican voters have recoiled in horror. We want our party to protect us from their madness.
And that’s an all-hands-on-deck challenge.
The Democratic Party nationalized state elections in 2008 with Barack Obama. It ceased to consist of free-wheeling, locally attuned legislators who represented different segments of the Democratic coalition and became a unified, unapologetic, left-wing movement that placed ideology first.
The Democrats’ goal wasn’t compromise. It was victory.
And during the Obama years, the Democrats won a lot.
The MAGA movement responded by nationalizing elections on the Republican side, too. It’s one of Donald Trump’s most significant legacies, because pre-Trump, we were a party of John Fettermans — always ready to swing a deal and compromise — and the best we could hope for was electing the occasional John Cornyn, who’d sway his GOP colleagues a little to the right.
It was an age when the Republican Party AND the Democratic Party were moving to the left. The only difference was, the Republicans moved slightly slower than the Democrats.
The Trump revolution wasn’t just a response to Democratic Party excesses. It was also a stinging rebuke to the GOP establishment — and to Republican politicians who’d cosplay as senior statesmen, earning mainstream media “kudos” for (repeatedly) bending their knee before their Democratic masters.
Snip.
Under the old rules, “conservative” senators like John Cornyn were incentivized to move to the middle, because their Republican seats were safe. Nobody dared primary a sitting GOP senator; therefore, his only real threat was being too “extreme” and angering the left.
As such, many conservative states and conservative districts had wishy-washy RINOs representing them in Congress. (Many were there for decades at a time.)
It was inefficient. We were squandering precious resources.
Not anymore. Now, on a national level, we expect more from conservative states and conservative districts — not less — and we’ll vote you out of office if you don’t deliver.
Like it or not, there are no local federal elections anymore. Everything is national. For better or worse, politics has become the ultimate team sport.
And the team that maximizes its resources is the one that will win.
If you want a bright future in today’s Republican Party, the path is clear: Be an asset to your team. Become indispensable. Listen to your coach, know your role, and do it well.
For all the money backing him, Cornyn was a weak candidate who’d grown out of touch with the base and state he represented. But Ken Paxton got the nod to be the Republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Texas the old fashioned way: He earned it.
Democrats get called on their Medicaid fraud and steal firefighter pensions, the awful atrocities Hamas committed against Israeli civilians, more details of the plot against America, another Democrat spying for the Chinese, a look at Finland’s deep civil defense infrastructure, and Uncle Rick discovers that Ivy League grads working for the New York Times are ignorant dumbasses.
ice President J.D. Vance certainly has been busy as America’s “Fraud Czar.”
Medicaid fraud in California is rampant, and as my colleague Mary Chastain noted in March, Vance’s anti-fraud task force suspended 70 hospice and home health care businesses in Los Angeles.
The move came shortly after investigations by CBS News and Nick Shirley revealed a fraud scheme in California involving hospices.
Vance’s task has then suspended over 400 more.
Now the Vice President has announced on Wednesday that the Trump administration is withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California and is threatening to suspend federal funding to all states if they don’t aggressively prosecute fraud in their Medicaid programs.
“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously, but also you have people who have been prescribed medications that they don’t even need. They’ve had drugs put into their bodies that they don’t need because fraudsters have actually encouraged false prescriptions and false administration of medications,” Vance said at the White House.
The move is similar to the one the administration took in February suspending Medicaid payments to Minnesota.
Vance said that the administration is also notifying all 50 states that it could freeze funding to their Medicaid Fraud Control Units “if they do not aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud.” The units, which exist in each state, investigate and prosecute Medicaid provider fraud. “We are going to turn off the money that goes to these anti-fraud units,” he said, if they fail to do their job.
This is a good start, but people need to go to prison.
Washington just became the first state in U.S. history to terminate a public employee pension plan.
The plan belongs to retired police officers and firefighters. LEOFF Plan 1 was 160% funded as of June 2024 per the state’s own actuarial valuation. It had not required a single contribution in 25 years. By 2029 it was projected to reach 200% funded with a $4.3 billion surplus.
The legislature terminated the plan, swept $3.9 billion, and is using $880 million of it to refill a rainy day fund it already drained to cover a deficit it created.
Days ago, retired first responders including former Congressman Dave Reichert sued the state to stop it. The bill passed the House 55-39 and was advanced out of Appropriations without a public hearing. Every yes vote was a Democrat. The governor signed it in April.
“Missouri Supreme Court Upholds New Congressional Map.” “The Missouri Supreme Court once again upheld the state’s new Congressional map, which would break-up the Kansas City Democratic seat and give Republicans a 7-1 advantage.”
They’ve got themselves into a position — which began with Barack Obama’s hollowing out of the party over a decade ago — in which they can’t afford to lose the next couple of elections, even as their position erodes.
Due to an “accidental error” in the 2020 census, blue states got more seats in the House — and more electoral votes — than they were entitled to. When that “error” is fixed, the situation will be worse for them. Then there’s the flood of refugees from blue states to red, further expanding their Congressional majorities. (But beware of the refugees who continue to vote blue. Where’s my “welcome wagon” proposal?)
Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is choking off the flood of taxpayer money that has kept leftist organizations and institutions afloat, buying votes with taxpayer dollars. And the federal workforce has shrunk 10% with more “draconian cuts” on the way.
It’s a bit like Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” to choke off the Confederacy — which worked once it was actually employed. (And Trump is doing something similar with Iran, choking it off gradually rather than going for a swift coup de main, which is disappointing some people but which will work at a much-reduced cost in lives. But that’s another essay.)
This is why the Democrats, and the left, but I repeat myself, are unhappy. They feel it happening.
Click through to hear the lamentations of their women.
Right after the ceasefire expired: “FP-2 Drones Swarm Russian Positions: Multiple Hits on Multiple Targets–Ammo Dumps, Training Centre.”
Finland officially became NATO’s newest member on April 4, 2023, becoming the 31st member of the alliance, about one month after neighboring Sweden joined.
One of the so-called “justifications” for Vladimir Putin’s utterly unjustifiable full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was that he didn’t want NATO expanding to his borders. Not counting Kaliningrad, that stretch of Russian territory between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, at the start of 2022, Russia had 446 miles of shared border with NATO members Norway, Estonia, and Latvia.
Finland shares 883 miles of border with Russia, so now that Finland is in NATO, Russia has 1,279 miles of shared border with NATO members, almost three times as much as before the invasion. It is a beautiful thing to see military territorial aggression backfire so thoroughly.
Considering Finland’s long and tense history with Russia, some might have expected the country to end up in the NATO alliance sooner. Once a territory of Sweden, then of Russia, Finland declared its independence in 1917. In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which relegated Finland to a Soviet sphere of influence. By November, Finland and the Soviets were fighting the three-month Winter War; this was when Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä, nicknamed the “White Death,” believed to have killed more than 500 enemy soldiers during the conflict, the highest number of sniper kills in any major war, and considered one of the deadliest snipers in history. (I suspect he is the only Finn to be featured in a video of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, taking on the Red Baron.) Finland resisted bravely against overwhelming Russian forces, but at the war’s end it was forced to cede about 9 percent of its territory. In June 1941, Finland and the Soviet Union returned to conflict in the Continuation War, with Finland a cobelligerent of Nazi Germany.
Finland argued that it was fighting a parallel but separate “continuation war” against the Soviet Union and had no formal treaty of alliance with Germany. While the U.S. ended diplomatic relations for a period, it never declared war against Finland.
When World War II ended, Finland retained its independence, but Soviet troops remained at its doorstep. In 1948, the Finnish government announced the “Treaty of Friendship,” declaring that Finland was committed to staying out of international conflicts between the great powers and limiting Finnish defense cooperation with third parties. “Finlandization” became a term to describe a state of technical independence and sovereignty, but heavy influence by the Kremlin.
The Finns’ preferred public stance of neutrality remained after the Cold War ended, and if not for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Finland might have remained a “NATO partner,” but not a member. In January 2022, public opinion polling found 30 percent of Finns supported Finland applying for NATO membership. Forty-three percent of respondents opposed applying for membership, and 27 percent were unsure of their position. About one month later, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, and by April, 68 percent of Finns supported applying for NATO membership.
You may have noticed that the Russian “special military operation” that was supposed to last four days has now lasted more than four years, the Russian military couldn’t spare any tanks for the Victory Day parades in Red Square this year, and a new estimate calculates that about 352,000 Russian soldiers have died in the war against Ukraine through the end of 2025. That is about six times the American in-theater deaths in the Vietnam War. Throw in the wounded and missing, and the Russian military has lost an estimated 1.4 million men.
The terrorists shot their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted their most intimate parts, to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.
Women were stripped, bound, stabbed, shot and burned. They were executed both during and after rape amid an orgy of violence in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
Heads were decapitated. Pelvic bones shattered. Even after death, sexual assault continued.
…
At Kibbutz Be’eri, nails, sharp objects, and pieces of metal and plastic were similarly embedded in a woman whose body was discovered naked and bound. On another victim, grenades were used.
…
Those taken hostage were assaulted in front of loved ones and young relatives forced to commit sex acts on each other, an intentional, premeditated strategy of kinocide to destroy family units even after release from captivity.
…
There was a recurring pattern of rape and gang rape; sexual torture; mutilation; targeted shooting to the face, head and genital area; forced nudity; binding and restraint; genital burning; objects inserted into intimate areas; post-mortem sexual humiliation; and execution during or after sexual assault.
Indeed, when Hamas led other terror groups into Israel they carried Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase lists commanding victims to ‘take off your pants’, ‘lie down’, and ‘spread your legs’.
This is the group the ideological core of the Democratic Party will do almost anything to back.
🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING: International actors are involved in the State Department led color revolution 🚨🚨
This is not speculation; it’s straight from a recorded call.
Ex-USAID employees describe how, before January 20, they moved internal groups off government systems and into encrypted Signal chats, then quickly linked with foreign partners and NGOs after the inauguration. This attempt at creating a color revolution isn’t new news; this part was already reported in NOTUS earlier this year.
But what’s not reported is the international aspect. One participant explicitly frames it as “a global anti-authoritarian movement,” connecting U.S. officials with “colleagues from around the world who have dealt with this directly.”
They reference coordination with Johns Hopkins, “international democracy and conflict mitigation spaces,” and efforts to mobilize across borders against what they perceive as domestic authoritarianism.
🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING: Inside The New Pluralists: how billionaires weaponized the Biden Administration, targeted Charlie Kirk, and are quietly financing America’s color revolution 🚨🚨
In 2017, a quiet meeting brought representatives of Soros, Koch, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations together for one purpose: to rethink how philanthropy influences politics.
Out of that meeting came the “New Pluralists,” a coalition that would go on to shape the Biden White House’s United We Stand summit, fund censorship-adjacent projects, and eventually intersect with investigations into Turning Point USA … and the color revolution that’s brewing in the United States now.
“Legal group exposes heavy use of Minnesota’s ‘vouching’ system to override voting ID rules. The records, which were obtained through a public records request, showed that Minnesota’s Election Day Registration process allows registered voters or certain residential facility employees to verify another voter’s residency in place of standard identification or proof-of-address documents.” “According to the data released by AFL, almost 18,900 Election Day registrations in 2024 involved the use of vouching. Of those, 13,441 were updates to existing voter registrations, while 5,457 involved new voter registrations.”
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
One of Britain’s ‘first gay dads’ and his husband have both been charged with rape, sexual assault and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, 57, also the UK’s first openly gay football club owner, and his husband Scott Hutchison, 32, will appear at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court today …
Drewitt-Barlow and his ex-husband Tony made headlines in 1999 when they became one of the first gay couples in the UK to have children through a surrogate mother.
An Essex Police statement said today: ‘Detectives have secured charges against two men in connection with an investigation into human trafficking for sexual exploitation, rape and other sexual offences.
‘Officers from the Serious Crime Directorate at Essex Police carried co-ordinated searches at premises in Danbury, Maldon, and Braintree on Wednesday and arrested two men. Since then we have been liaising with the Crown Prosecution Service.
‘We can now confirm that 57 year-old Barrie Drewitt-Barlow and 32 year-old Scott Drewitt-Barlow, both of Danbury, have both been charged with multiple offences including rape, sexual assault, and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Pennsylvania Democrat Sen. John Fetterman has reiterated that he is done with the insanity gripping his party. In a series of raw appearances on Bill Maher’s show and a new Washington Post op-ed, Fetterman is torching the reflexive anti-Trump obsession, the normalization of radical left ideas once dismissed as smears, and the sloppy 24-hour news cycle that turns opinions into “news.”
Fetterman made clear he refuses to play along with the extremes. “My colleagues and people that are running, whether for the Senate where the House, they are literally running on f*ck Trump,” he said.
“I mean, that’s literally—they have campaign commercials with that. It’s absurd,” he noted, adding “And we are getting to that point and I refuse to engage in that extreme, those terms. And we have to find a better way forward.”
Fetterman repeated the sentiments in an op-ed in The Washington Post, titled “I Haven’t Changed. Here’s What Has,” writing “My party cannot simply be the opposite of whatever President Donald Trump says.”
He stresses, “Working across the aisle is the only way forward” and calls “pointless pile-ons and attacks” unproductive. Fetterman highlights once-mainstream Democratic positions on border security, support for Israel, and avoiding government shutdowns that have now become “toxic” to the party’s fringe base.
He declares, “Someone who comes here illegally and commits a violent crime should be deported. Full stop.”
This week’s Democrat acting as a spy for the communist Chinese is the mayor of Arcadia.
A California mayor admitted to acting as an illegal foreign agent of China, resigning from her position in a shocking federal plea deal unsealed on Monday.
Democrat Eileen Wang agreed with prosecutors that she worked with the People’s Republic of China to boost propaganda with a fake news website on US soil between 2020 and 2022. She was elected to the city council in Arcadia — a city in the San Gabriel Valley within LA County — in November 2022.
Wang, 58, worked with her then-fiancé, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, on a website called “U.S. News Center,” which claimed to be a news source for Chinese Americans, according to court documents.
But in reality, the pair were carrying out Beijing’s orders through the site.
Wang and Sun “executed directives” from the Chinese government, posting propaganda designed to boost China, all while reporting back to their masters with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories, according to the plea agreement.
“Harris County Treasurer Arrested for Second DWI in Office, After Burglary Charge Dismissed. Carla Wyatt was arrested in Galveston County last weekend.”
Harris County Treasurer Carla Wyatt has been arrested for a third time since taking office in 2023, while county commissioners consider abolishing the treasurer’s office altogether.
Galveston County law enforcement arrested Wyatt on Saturday for allegedly driving while intoxicated (DWI) and she was being held on a $3,000 bond with an addendum hold.
Wyatt was arrested for DWI in Harris County in December 2023 after testing indicated she had a blood alcohol level of 0.15 percent, which is nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 percent.
Court records indicate Wyatt did not comply with the terms of her bond conditions on at least two occasions, including one in which she failed a blood alcohol blow test in March 2024. She reportedly completed a pretrial diversion program, however, and her DWI charge was dismissed in August of that year.
In December 2025, Wyatt was arrested again in Harris County and charged with breaking into a vehicle with intent to commit theft, but a grand jury declined to indict her and the charge was dropped last month.
Wyatt’s attorney Christopher Downey has argued that Wyatt struggles with medical issues, including alleged cerebrovascular disease, which affects the flow of blood to the brain.
So the excuse for her lawbreaking is literally “Her brain don’t work right.”
An Orange County Democrat’s struggling campaign is fighting back after ex-staffers accused the candidate of turning a discussion about her fake boobs into an all-hands meeting.
Janet Keo Conklin, a real estate agent and La Palma council member who is seeking to become Orange County’s next assessor, has denied allegations that she forced staff to feel her breasts while claiming she had no feeling in her nipples.
On Friday, LAist reported that Conklin — who is also accused of misusing campaign money on personal expenses — allegedly told two staffers that “she has no feeling in her nipples” and placed their hands on her chest to “give it a squeeze.”
I wonder if adding a “nipples” tag would help or hurt my page ranks…
A problem not just in Texas, but nationally: “Finals Week for Texas Schools, Universities Delayed by Hack of Education Service Canvas. Some students’ screens showed a message from the hacking group ShinyHunters.”
A cyberattack on Canvas, a system used by schools and universities throughout the nation, disrupted finals week for thousands of students in Texas, though it is now back online.
According to Baylor University, on Thursday, May 7, several universities reported that access to the Canvas system was blocked by a ransom notice. Canvas, which is owned by the company Instructure, is utilized by 41 percent of higher education institutions in the U.S. According to Instructure, Canvas has over 30 million active users.
Canvas is a cloud-based management system that houses grade books, submissions, teaching materials, and classroom communications.
The data breach was traced to “Free for Teacher” accounts within the Canvas system. The free parts of the site, which were particularly susceptible to a data breach, are now disabled according to Instructure. As of Saturday, Canvas is available for most users, but parts of the cloud system remain under maintenance.
Consider this yet another reason to implement rolling offsite backup for all mission critical data.
Tyler Brown, the man who allegedly opened fire on passing cars on a Boston highway on Monday, was previously convicted of the attempted murder of a police officer and released after serving just five years in prison.
Brown, 46, is accused of firing 50 to 60 rounds at random passersby on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, hitting dozens of cars. Two people were hit and remain in critical condition in a nearby hospital. Video of the incident taken by an eyewitness shows Brown running back and forth in the traffic lanes, firing at random.
A State Police trooper and Marine veteran caught in the traffic jam that resulted from the incident shot Brown, who is now in custody at a Boston-area ICU.
Troopers found witnesses hiding under their cars, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said during a press conference Monday.
Brown is from Boston and has been under the supervision of either the Massachusetts Probation Department or Department of Parole, Ryan said.
In May 2020, Brown opened fire on a pair of police officers who were responding to a 911 call, firing 13 rounds, one of which was fired at “close range.” The two cops returned fire, but no one was hit.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called the nuclear phaseout a “serious strategic mistake” that left Germany short of firm power that turned the Energiewende into the most expensive energy transition on the planet. This is an early marker for a developing worldwide retreat from policies that sidelined nuclear power and demonized coal, oil, and natural gas.
Germany stubbornly closed its last three functioning nuclear reactors in April 2023 right in the middle of a crippling energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine. As pragmatists predicted, German citizens now suffer under punishingly high electricity prices and remain heavily dependent on imported energy.
The green dream was sold as a route to “cheap” renewables, yet the reality for German households and factories has been record‑high electricity prices, complex subsidies for favored businesses and individuals who conform to the climate narrative, and a grid that struggles on windless days or under gray skies.
Japan made a remarkably similar error but is finally correcting course. After the Fukushima disaster, the government panicked and shut down all 54 of its nuclear reactors. Today, Japan is slowly restarting those idle units.
The pattern is plain to see. Countries abandon dependable power sources under political pressure, then spend years rebuilding what they had demonized and dismantled.
Jim Geraghty has a pretty cool look inside Finland’s civil defense infrastructure.
Perhaps no other city in the world has done more to prepare for being bombed than Helsinki. What started as a response to hard lessons from the bombing of Finland’s cities in World War II by the Soviets accelerated through the era of nuclear fears of the Cold War, and continues to this day and demonstrates a particularly Finnish approach to how you protect your citizens from aerial bombardment. Join me for a walk through one of the largest and most complex underground structures in the world.
Helsinki, Finland — In the downtown of this capital city, just off Hakaniemi Market Square, the entrance to Arena Center Hakaniemi could easily be mistaken for an elevator and stairway to an underground parking garage. In fact, the underground complex does include a parking garage — alongside a gym, several youth soccer courts, and a whole lot else.
But the stairs go deep — eight flights, and each landing of each flight is made of metal grates, creating the unnerving sense that you can see all the way down, beneath your shoes.
But there’s a purpose to this flooring, even if it’s no friend to any user unnerved by looking down from a great height. If some sort of terrible explosion occurred at the entrance to the stairs, some of the concussive force from the blast would pass through the flooring of the stairway landings, hopefully keeping the stairway intact.
Arena Center Hakaniemi is part of a vast network of underground civil defense shelters.
Snip.
After [World War II], the Finns decided that if bombs ever fell on their cities again, everyone in the country would have access to an underground shelter.
The result is more than 50,000 civil defense shelters across the country, with space for 4.8 million people, which is almost sufficient for the population of 5.5 million people. The shelters underneath Helsinki collectively have room for 940,000 people; the city has about 700,000 residents.
As Atlas Obscura puts it, “No Finnish government official would ever mention Russia as the reason for such defensive preparations, but they don’t have to.”)
While many of these bunkers were built during the Cold War, the construction of mandatory shelters in new buildings is still a standard requirement in Finland. Residences or workplaces, or any building above 1,200 square meters that is permanently occupied, must have a shelter, as must any industrial building more than 1,500 square meters. The construction cost is not subsidized and must be covered by the owner of the building.
Once you get to the bottom of Arena Center Hakaniemi, you are greeted by two large doors. Our guide, Civil Defense Planning Officer Jukka-Pekka Schroderus, explains that the first massive and thick steel door is to protect anyone inside the shelter from any explosive blast wave; the second is to protect those inside from chemicals, potential biological weapons or toxins, gases, or radiation.
Snip.
The underground shelters are built with ventilation, autonomous water supply, and air filtration systems. The shelters do not have stored food; Finns are expected to have a “go bag” with proof of identity (although it’s not required to enter the shelter), food, personal medication, and hygienic supplies for up to three days. Finnish civil defense authorities also recommend sleeping bags, flashlights and batteries, and iodine tablets. Alcohol is not permitted, which is probably wise but disappointing. In any circumstance where I would need to hastily evacuate to a vast underground shelter, I could probably use a drink.
It’s hard to imagine Finns not drinking.
Here’s what makes the Helsinki shelters particularly surreal: They’re used all the time for other non-emergency activities. As mentioned above, Arena Center Hakaniemi has gyms and indoor soccer fields, as well as a kids’ bounce house and a snack bar. Other underground shelters have pools. The Finnish authorities hope that they will have 72 hours to prepare the shelters for emergency protective use — draining the pools, removing extraneous equipment, etc.
Schroderus explained that it was important that civilians use the shelters for non-emergency purposes on a regular basis for several reasons. First, regular use exposes maintenance issues — leaks in the ceiling, lights that have burned out, etc. Second, in case of an emergency, Finns will already be familiar with the nearby underground complexes.
Off topic from civil defense, but of interest to those following anti-drone technology:
Later in the day, my group of American journalists visited the Finnish technology firm Sensofusion, which manufactures anti-drone weapons — jammers, as well as smaller, faster drones that deploy in small groups and intercept and down incoming drones. Sensofusion’s CEO and founder, Tuomas Rasila, told us his company wanted to develop the best anti-drone defense systems but had no interest in building weapons to kill human beings.
One of Sensofusion’s ideas in the works is a “Tactical Drone Factory,” which the company touts as a “fully self-contained drone manufacturing facility built inside a standard shipping container. Equipped with industrial 3D printers, an electronics assembly station, and a complete parts inventory, a single Drone Factory can produce approximately 50 interceptor drones per day. The factory can be operated by a small team and deployed anywhere in the world.”
Read the whole thing.
WTF? “School district kicks out Christian student ministry because founder opposes tax increase.”
Student ministries that provide “released-time” Bible instruction during public school hours and opponents of tax increases have separately clashed with school districts over their constitutional rights to equal treatment with secular groups and free speech, respectively.
The Rev. Gady Youmans endured a double whammy when Georgia’s Vidalia City Schools retaliated against his Sweet Onion Christian Learning Center for Youmans’ Facebook posts criticizing the school board’s proposal to raise property taxes in light of its top-heavy administrative structure, a new lawsuit alleges.
Superintendent Sandy Reid explicitly told Youmans that she and the board were ending Vidalia High School’s 11-year relationship with Sweet Onion because of his posts on the “tax issue,” but when Youmans protested, Reid also vaguely referred to parents who pulled their children from his program because of how it was taught, according to the suit.
History Matters has a video up covering why Germany didn’t stop in 1939 after having annexed so much land.
Hasan Piker attacks Shoe0nHead for daring to criticize Hasan Piker. He does not come out well in the exchange.
Artificial intelligence platforms may be just as susceptible to social engineering as human beings, but they are proving remarkably good at finding security vulnerabilities in human-made computer code. That reality is on full display this month with some of the more widely-used software makers — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Oracle — fixing near record volumes of security bugs, and/or quickening the tempo of their patch releases.
As it does on the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft today released software updates to address at least 118 security vulnerabilities in its various Windows operating systems and other products. Remarkably, this is the first Patch Tuesday in nearly two years that Microsoft is not shipping any fixes to deal with emergency zero-day flaws that are already being exploited. Nor have any of the flaws fixed today been previously disclosed (potentially giving attackers a heads up in how to exploit the weakness).
Sixteen of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, meaning malware or miscreants could abuse these bugs to seize remote control over a vulnerable Windows device with little or no help from the user.
Snip.
May’s Patch Tuesday is a welcome respite from April, which saw Microsoft fix a near-record 167 security flaws. Microsoft was among a few dozen tech giants given access to a “Project Glasswing,” a much-hyped AI capability developed by Anthropic that appears quite effective at unearthing security vulnerabilities in code.
Apple, another early participant in Project Glasswing, typically fixes an average of 20 vulnerabilities each time it ships a security update for iOS devices, said Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti. On May 11, Apple shipped updates to address at least 52 vulnerabilities and backported the changes all the way to iPhone 6s and iOS 15.
Last month, Mozilla released Firefox 150, which resolved a whopping 271 vulnerabilities that were reportedly discovered during the Glasswing evaluation.
“Since Firefox 150.0.0 released, they have been on a more aggressive weekly cadence for security updates including the release of Firefox 150.0.3 on May Patch Tuesday resolving between three to five CVEs in each release,” Goettl said.
Rick Beato delves deeper into the New York Times ridiculous Top 30 Living Songwriters list and discovers ignorant, pretentious, social justice-infected Ivy League grads who have no idea what they’re talking about. “Here’s four Ivy League educated people. You’ve got two from Yale, one from Princeton, and Mr. Harvard there, that are the most pretentious, cork sniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music. Exactly what you would expect from a New York Times music critic.”
Happy Good Friday! More Democrat voting fraud, Iran manages to shoot down a couple of planes, more California fraud under Governor Hairgel, Commies gonna commie, Microsoft behaving (and performing) badly, Pakistan’s nefarious actions backfire (yet again), the best rifle for a militia, and a list of bad actors in the job market.
This is Democrat Joel Caldwell of the “Coalition for the People’s Agenda,” a Fulton County ballot-harvesting NGO chief—caught on tape admitting it all.
Democrats are stuffing ballot drop boxes with fraudulent votes, and it’s all caught on videotape. He also admits this is how they rigged the 2020 election and why Democrats fight to the death against voter ID.
• They pay people to illegally ballot-harvest.
• They bribe ballot counters and election officials.
• They forge and falsify ballots.
And the Atlanta mayor straight-up stole the election.
He says it all himself—on tape.
Joel Caldwell:
“That’s what happened in 2020, ’cause that’s when the ballots—they started stuffing them ballots and people stuffing them ballots, and they got videotape of them, but nobody talks about it. That’s why Trump was making that big deal about it, because you see it on videotape. It’s like, come on. We see the man pull up and put a hundred ballots in this box. You know? You can’t do that sh*t.
So groups were paying people to do just that—drop off ballots.”
He continues: That’s why Democrats fight to the death against voter ID laws.
Joel Caldwell:
“That’s why the Republicans are always trying to fight the ballot—you know, that’s the whole argument, because Republicans are the ones who put out that kind of stuff, so they want voter IDs and stuff. Democrats are fighting voter ID laws. It’s a two-sided thing. That’s what they’re fighting over. Republicans are trying to say, ‘Hey, look, we got proof of this sh*t.’
And the Democrats are like, well, we don’t want voter ID laws, and we want to make it where you can just drop your ballot off—online voting and different things they try to come up with.”
Iran manages to shoot down both an F-15 and an A-10 on the same day. Two of the three downed airmen have already been rescued. It’s worth noting that neither of those planes are remotely stealthy.
Earlier this week, Jose Medina-Medina, an illegal immigrant whom the Biden administration caught and released at the border, murdered Loyola University freshman Sheridan Gorman. Medina-Medina had previously been arrested at least twice in Chicago, yet was released by local authorities, thanks to their sanctuary policies. According to reports, he approached her, raised a gun, and opened fire as she tried to flee. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The Democratic Party’s response has been nothing short of horrific.
Snip.
The reaction from Democrats to Gorman’s death has been so despicable that Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) unloaded on his own party over it.
“Why can’t we just talk about that life lost?” Fetterman told Fox News’s Bill Hemmer. “Why can’t we just acknowledge that this is serious, serious failure?”
Fetterman also invoked the Laken Riley Act, the legislation requiring the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants who commit crimes. Fetterman was one of only a handful of Democrats to vote for it — a fact he’s clearly not going to let his colleagues forget.
“I think only seven or eight Democrats even voted for [the] Laken Riley [Act],” he said. “Why can’t you just agree that if you’re breaking the law and you’re already here illegally, deport them? I just don’t understand.”
He continued, “Tragedies like what happened to that young woman, they are gonna continue to happen,” he said. “That’s beyond common sense.”
Hemmer pressed him on why Democrats can’t seem to get there, and Fetterman gave an honest, if uncomfortable, answer.
A Just the News investigation has detailed how a wealthy Marxist activist best known for the funding of a global financial network both inside the U.S. and around the world has extensive ties to Chinese Communist Party-linked organizations inside of China.
China-based entrepreneur Neville Roy Singham lives and works in Shanghai, — which the American businessman now calls home — where he runs his network of pro-CCP news sites and other China-linked endeavors. Singham, who sold his ThoughtWorks tech company in 2017, has used the money to fund openly communist endeavors worldwide. Just the News can show that inside of China, Singham and his network collaborate with an array of Chinese propaganda sites, Chinese universities, and other Chinese groups committed to advancing the CCP.
Singham leads and funds a global financial and activist network that operates inside the U.S. and many other countries, and while he rarely grabs the spotlight for himself in public speeches, he did so in November through the Chinese release of a report that sought to denigrate U.S. and Allied Power contributions to WWII.
Singham admitted during a CCP-backed forum in Shanghai in November that he had written the 174-page report to combat the U.S.-backed “international rules-based order” — which he called a “lie” — and to help the CCP and its longtime strongman Xi Jinping achieve a “new world order” more favorable to China. This report and the conference where it was introduced helped expose the extensive CCP-linked network in which Singham is ensconced within China.
Just the News reviewed hundreds of pages of Chinese business documents and U.S. tax records, English and Chinese language news sites, Chinese government websites, and more in an effort to provide the most comprehensive look yet at Singham’s operations from his perch in Shanghai.
Also: “Singham colludes with CCP to rewrite history of WWII to advance Xi Jinping’s ‘new world order.'”
The wealthy Marxist businessman behind a sprawling far-left network is collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party to denigrate the Allied actions in World War II in an effort to upend the U.S.-led international system and to advance Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s “new world order.”
China-based businessman Neville Roy Singham leads and funds a global financial and activist network that operates inside the U.S. and many other countries, and while he rarely grabs the spotlight for himself in public speeches, he did so in November through the release of a report that denigrates U.S. and Allied Power contributions to WWII.
Singham directly admitted during a CCP-backed forum in Shanghai in November that he had written the 174-page report to combat the U.S.-backed “international rules-based order” — which he called a “lie” — and to help the CCP and its longtime strongman Xi achieve a “new world order” more favorable to China.
The wealthy communist activist summed up the crux of his WWII argument thusly: “As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory in the World Anti-Fascist War (WAFW), the Western powers spin their familiar tale: U.S. industrial might and British resolve saved the world from fascism. This is a lie. The truth burns in the numbers: while the Western powers calculated their economic advantage, the Soviet and Chinese peoples paid in blood. Fascism was defeated not by Anglo-American capital but by socialist leadership and mass heroism – a brilliant strategy from Moscow and Yan’an, unbreakable resilience from workers and peasants who refused to surrender, and a sacrifice that saved humanity from slavery.”
Multiple senior HHS officials estimate that, under Gavin Newsom, California’s state Medicaid program has lost 25 percent of its budget to fraud. This would mean it is currently losing $50 billion a year to scammers, fraudsters, and organized crime rings.
Snip.
We conducted interviews with public officials, fraud experts, and political figures, and reviewed hundreds of pages of government reports, state audits, criminal indictments, and other public records on California fraud. From unemployment insurance and Medicaid to failed homeless initiatives and welfare programs, seemingly every state program has been compromised by criminals. The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.
In this firehose torrent of news, less attention than is proper has been paid to the fact that we’re finally going back to the moon. Or, technically, around it, since they’re doing the figure flyby of the dark side. They’re already halfway there…
Though the mainstream media will undoubtedly portray them as “mostly peaceful,” much of what we saw at the “No Kings” protests Saturday was anything but, whether through actions or symbols used during the demonstrations.
We’ll start off with New York City, where the Communist flags were in full effect:
BREAKING: Leftists in NYC chant “There is only one solution, Communist revolution” at the No Kings rally.
Communist flags at the NYC ‘No Kings’ protest pic.twitter.com/bIh2UiwkDI
— NJEG Media (@NJEGmedia) March 28, 2026
Snip.
Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz (D) was pledging solidarity with the Somali community:
“We will never leave the side of our Somali Minnesotans. Here’s our pledge to you, our Somali Minnesotans, your grandchildren will still be here when that orange clown is in the dustbin of history.”
I guess its too much to ask a Democrat governor to stand with actual Americans. Plus rioting in Denver.
Earlier this week the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in a case challenging a Mississippi statute allowing mail-in ballot received up to five days after Election Day to be counted.
The law appears to defy three federal laws that require that federal elections be held the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. The question is what did Congress mean by Election Day. Was it a day, five days later, a month later. Does Election Day mean election season.
The 5th Circuit ruled against Mississippi, which brought the case to SCOTUS. It could have profound impact on Democrats’ mail-in ballot strategy if ballots must be received by election official by Election Day.
I discussed the case and oral argument, plus redistricting and the Equal Protection Projects challenge to discriminatory NY State education practices, with Jesse Kelly, who tweeted out the portion regarding NY State: “It appears Kathy Hochul is defying the Supreme Court.”
Pam Bondi is out as attorney general, President Trump announced Thursday, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will serve as acting attorney general.
“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump said in a statement on Truth Social. “Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900.”
“We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future, and our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected Legal Mind, Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General,” he added.
The announcement came just one day after Bondi was at the White House to attend Trump’s address to the nation on the Iran war. She had also accompanied Trump to the Supreme Court to watch oral arguments in a birthright citizenship case.
The handling of the Epstein files and the lack of progress on indicting anti-Trump conspirators like James Comey were suggested as reasons for Trump letting her go.
Target has gone from pushing the radical transsexual agenda to being boycotted by Randi Weingarten for not condemning ICE. I haven’t shopped there once since they started boosting the tranny agenda, but maybe it’s time to go back again…
Pakistani is enjoying a nice, rich dinner of blowback.
For decades, the Islamabad establishment has played a dangerous game, nurturing the Taliban as a strategic depth agent against India. Today, this plan backfires, and the resulting explosion of violence threatens to send a fresh wave of illegal immigration toward the already strained borders of the European Union.
The “open war” declared by Defence Minister Khawaja Asif marks the end of a thirty-year illusion. The apprentice has not only left the master. He has now turned openly against him. The March 16 strike on Kabul was the moment masks fell. When Pakistani warplanes hammered a rehabilitation centre in the heart of the Afghan capital, the “Islamic brotherhood” of the two neighbours officially ceased to be.
Islamabad claims it is hunting the TTP — the Pakistani Taliban who find sanctuary under the wings of their Afghan cousins. Kabul denies it. The result is a cycle of diplomacy-in-name-only, where the only language spoken is the language of the air strike, the AK-47 and the suicide vest. This is the reality of the post-American vacuum.
Critics of the Biden presidency, watching from America and Europe, see the vindication of their most cynical instincts. They warned that the vacuum left by the 2021 withdrawal would be filled by chaos. They were right. Just look at Bagram Airfield. It once was the crown jewel of American power. It has now become a trophy in a war between two states the West can no longer control.
While the world’s eyes are fixed on the Iranian plateau, South Asia is burning. The region’s most volatile border is no longer Kashmir. It is the frontier where the Taliban’s jihadist agenda meets Pakistani nuclear-armed desperation. How safe is the world when a nuclear power goes to war with a ghost? The answer is terrifying. Pakistan’s military capacity dwarfs that of the Taliban, yet the Taliban have time, resolve and a complete lack of accountability.
While the Pakistani economy teeters and its domestic security implodes with a second insurgency front up against Baloch separatists in the south, the Afghan Taliban are playing the long game. They see a Pakistan that is overextended and a West that is exhausted. They are not interested in ceasefires brokered by Qatar or Turkey. They are interested in survival and the expansion of their ideological reach.
Almost nobody talks about it, but we are witnessing the “Gaza-fication” of the Durand Line. The same knowhow of displacement and grazing the land is being applied to the tribal areas. Millions of thousands of people have already been displaced. But the humanitarian cost is only a footnote in a larger, more brutal calculation.
For Islamabad, this is an existential fight against the TTP thorn in its side. For Kabul, it is about defending the sovereignty they fought for twenty years to reclaim. Neither side can afford to blink. The light of the old order is fading. The era where the Pakistani military could manage Afghanistan like a colonial fiefdom is over. The trust is dead.
Trump’s “America First” doctrine means that if Pakistan wants to fight this war, it will do so without a blank check from the Pentagon. The bitter truth for the region is that old security guarantees are gone. We are entering an era of fluidity, where borders are written in fire. The “special relationship” between Islamabad and Kabul has become hatred. The Taliban have proven they can survive an American occupation. Surviving Pakistan’s aggression should not be that hard.
And then there are all of those “refugees” Euroelites seem bound and determined to import. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The attack involved a sophisticated mix of long-range unmanned systems, likely between eight and fifteen primary strike drones supported by smaller decoys designed to saturate Russian air defenses. These drones traveled approximately one thousand kilometers from Ukrainian territory, penetrating deep into Russian airspace and reaching the Gulf of Finland near the Estonian border. Evidence suggests the use of fixed-wing kamikaze drones optimized for endurance and precision. Ukrainians also utilized small prop-planes modified to fly as unmanned aircraft, mounting droppable Fab bombs on the bottom, which could be dropped on target, in addition to the craft being used as a kamikaze platform.
Also:
Ukraine has delivered a decisive strategic blow just as Russia expected to capitalize on soaring oil prices driven by the Iran war, but got its export system crippled instead. With unimaginable 40% of its oil export capacity wiped out, ports burning for days, and follow-up strikes continuing, the question is no longer whether Russia can recover quickly, but whether Ukraine will strike again before Russia has the chance to do so.
After over four years of war, Ukraine’s military says it’s testing an exoskeleton in the field that can help soldiers more easily load artillery and run at speeds of up to 12 mph over sustained periods. The tests would mark one of the first known examples of exoskeletons used on the front lines of an active military operation.
A Facebook video shared late last week by Ukraine’s 7th Air Assault Corps shows a handful of soldiers putting on the device while inside of a muddy artillery trench. The device itself wraps around a soldier’s waist and legs and is supported by a back brace. The military claims that it can reduce overall load on leg muscles by 30 percent. In practice, that means the devices should make it easier for soldiers to pick up and load heavy artillery rounds. Each round can weigh upwards of 100 pounds, depending on the particular caliber used. Since a soldier on the battlefield may load several dozen of those runs every day, all of that weight adds up and can increase the odds of injury or fatigue.
Not quite Heinlein’s powered armor, but we’re getting there…
Paxton’s office has now proposed detailed rules to implement the statute. The proposal was submitted to the Secretary of State on March 16 and published in the Texas Register on March 27, triggering a public comment period before the rules can be finalized.
The draft rules flesh out how SB 17 will work in practice, with the Office of the Attorney General as the central enforcement hub for the ban.
One of the most significant features is a new duty to report suspected violations.
Under the proposal, anyone involved in facilitating a real estate transaction—such as mortgage lenders, title insurance companies, property insurers, appraisers, and licensed real estate professionals—would be required to report any suspected SB 17 violations to the attorney general.
Complaints would have to be submitted either through an online complaint form on the OAG’s website or by mail to a designated address. Failure to report may subject entities to enforcement action once the rules are in place, potentially deputizing the real estate industry to help police foreign adversary land deals.
The rules would also place a tight lid on information that reaches Paxton’s office.
All complaints, civil investigative demands, and related materials submitted to or issued by the OAG would be treated as confidential and not subject to public disclosure, except when disclosure is required by law. That means Texans may see enforcement actions and lawsuits, but not necessarily the complaints and background investigation files that triggered them.
Wither Canada? “The 177,000 signature threshold has now been passed, officially clearing the requirement for an Alberta independence referendum on October 19th.”
John Cleese: “The British do not like the kind of diversity that intends to take over Britain and kill any infidel who does not convert to Islam.”
Weirdly, Microsoft is also saying that “Microsoft says Copilot is for entertainment purposes only, not serious use — firm pushing AI hard to consumers and businesses tells users not to rely on it for important advice.” Which is ironic, since right now its website touts Copilot as “AI built for work.”
Stephen Green: And the first piece of software to break on the moon mission? Microsoft Outlook.
And speaking of Microsoft woes, “Microsoft closes worst quarter on Wall Street since 2008 on AI concerns.”
Speaking of bad actors in the job market: “Outrage as Oracle makes thousands of foreign-worker requests amid layoff bloodbath.”
As thousands of Oracle employees awoke on Tuesday to an email informing them they were being laid off, the workers likely didn’t know the tech company had been busy trying to hire foreign staff.
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, Oracle filed for roughly 3,126 petitions to employ H-1B workers in fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Employers must submit the paperwork when seeking to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations like technology. Some 436 of those petitions were filed this year alone.
Amazon, which in January said it would axe 16,000 corporate employees, has filed for some 2,675 H-1B petitions during the same two-year fiscal period. That came on top of news in October that the retail giant was axing 14,000 corporate workers.
What’s the best gun for a militia? No surprise that three different gun experts (including Ian McCollum) all pick the AK-47.
Critical Drinker finally watches Mr. Inbetween, and really likes it. It’s been on my radar for a while, but there doesn’t seem to be a US DVD or Blu-Ray release of it, and I don’t have any streaming service.
Some Iran War updates, Russo-Ukrainian War updates, Democrats, Trannies, and Tranny Democrat child sex offenders, a Democrat judge bonds out a would-be jihad mass murderer, Bible discussion turns a bus rider stabby, and gamers come out against AI “assistance.” Plus: Marlene Dietrich, show us your guns!
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Still having the occasional 429 error, but if I wait an hour, they seem to clear.
President Trump weighs boots on the ground options in Iran. In addition to the Marines, the storied 82nd Airborne Division is an option.
IRGC “Brigadier General Ali Mohammad Naeini killed in overnight strike.” “Naeini had been the public face of Iran’s military communications throughout the conflict.” Not anymore…
When co-host David Friedberg asked Fetterman point-blank, “Who do you think leads the Democratic Party today?” the Pennsylvania senator didn’t flinch. “Oh, we don’t have one,” he said. “I think the TDS, that’s the leader right now. You know, right now our party is governed by the TDS.”
Fetterman then described what that governance actually looks like in practice – a kind of loyalty test that runs in reverse. Opposition to Trump has become the organizing principle, the ideological north star. Agree with anything the other side does and you face consequences. “It’s made it virtually impossible, without being punished, as a Democrat, to agree something’s good, or ‘I agree with the other side,'” he said.
He then cited Operation Epic Fury – the U.S. military campaign against Iran – as the latest illustration of the problem. Fetterman said he is “literally the only Democrat […] in Congress, that I’ve come across that’s saying, ‘I think it’s a great thing to break and destroy the Iranian regime.’ I think it’s entirely appropriate to hold them accountable.”
Fetterman correctly pointed out that this is not a fringe or even partisan position, historically. Every Democrat who ran for president in recent memory vowed Iran would never get a nuclear weapon. Now that it’s actually happening, the party’s response has been mostly blind criticism of President Trump for finally taking action.
Fetterman previously accused Democrats of refusing to put “country over party” over the Iran strikes.
“The last two professional candidates for the Democratic Party all agreed that we can never allow Iran to acquire nuclear bombs, and that’s made that possible now. I think we can say, ‘Hey, that’s a great thing. That makes the world more safe, more secure and holds Iran accountable,’” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity earlier this month, after 53 House Democrats voted against a resolution declaring that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism — something which isn’t remotely in doubt. “That’s almost 25% of Democrats in the House that can’t just call Iran the world’s biggest terrorism underwriter,” Fetterman added.
“Virtually every Democrat that I’m aware of says we can never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb, and they were a significant risk to America,” Fetterman continued. “I know why they [Democrats] don’t say that now because I’m aware that it is very damaging as a Democrat to just happen to agree with the president on anything. But, for me, that’s easy — country over party.”
Deep State functionaries seem unclear on tricky concepts like “chain of command” and “democracy.” “”US intel hid Chinese 2020 election meddling from Trump because they opposed his policies.” “Dr. Barry A. Zulauf, a member of the Senior National Intelligence Service reported that others in the intelligence community said ‘I don’t want my intelligence going to the White House where it will be used by that vulgarian in the Oval Office to support policies against China with which I personally disagree.'”
Analysts inside the U.S. intelligence community sought to conceal evidence of Chinese influence efforts from President Donald Trump during the 2020 election, with analysts saying they didn’t want their intel used by “that vulgarian in the Oval Office” to pursue policies toward China they personally disagreed with.
The revelation is found within a January 2021 report written by — and never before reported upon comments by — analytic ombudsman Barry Zulauf, who conducted a review of the spy community’s handling of Russian versus Chinese meddling efforts during the 2020 election. Among his conclusions was that intelligence analysts downplayed China’s actions because they had disdain for the “vulgarian” Trump and did not want to support the policies and priorities of the Trump administration toward China with which they “personally disagree.”
Just the News reported this week that the U.S. intelligence community has known since early 2020 that Beijing also gained access to American voter registration data and used that information to conduct opinion analysis related to the presidential election between Trump and then-former Vice President Joe Biden.
This is not the only piece of evidence pointing to Chinese government election influence efforts in the 2020 election. Although much about China’s activities in 2020 remains classified, Just the News conducted a thorough review of publicly-available intelligence assessments, federal indictments, foreign government warnings, and cybersecurity firm analyses.
There is credible evidence that Chinese government-linked cyber hackers and Chinese social media troll farms took aim at the U.S. presidential election in 2020 and sought to undercut Trump during his run against now-former President Biden. There are also indicators that Chinese intelligence and law enforcement agencies — China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and its Ministry of Public Security (MPS) — also played a role in 2020.
Republicans love America. Democrats’ love for America is contingent on a Democrat in the White House.
A man who was shot and killed by police in Dallas was part of Texas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s security detail, multiple sources reported on Friday.
According to CBS News, the individual in question was “known publicly as Mike King,” although he’d been using various aliases to gain employment.
He was also running a business that placed law enforcement officers in off-duty jobs — and was a figure present near Crockett at numerous campaign stops during her failed bid to gain the party’s Senate nomination, as photographic evidence showed.
King was fatally shot Wednesday after a standoff with a SWAT team in Dallas outside of Children’s Medical Center.
According to DFW Scanner, a site that chronicles crime reports from police scanners in and around the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, the suspect “barricaded himself in a vehicle at 1934 Medical District Drive.”
“Officers used tear gas in an effort to get the suspect out of the vehicle. He exited the vehicle armed with a gun, and pointed it at officers,” the report noted. “Officers opened fire and killed the suspect.”
Early reports indicated that he was a fugitive who was known to police and was under investigation for impersonation of a law enforcement officer.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Democrats just have a gift for hiring they best, don’t they?
“Reddit’s biggest trans moderator was just unmasked as convicted child sex abuser.” Branden “Brynn” Dunleavy. “The whistleblower, who waved the red flag, said he thinks this Branden and his crimes were deliberately shielded” by other Reddit moderators. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Monsterous: “Transgender ‘youth advocate’ was just charged with raping a BABY GIRL.” William Kelso Flournoy IV even filmed himself doing it. Hell’s too good for him.
The accusations come from two of the alleged victims themselves, one who was 12 when she said the sexual abuse started. The other alleged victim quoted in the piece was 13 when she says Chavez sexually abused her:
Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.
He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”
The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.
[…]
Ms. Murguia and Ms. [Debra] Rojas, both of whom are now 66, were the daughters of longtime organizers who had marched in rallies alongside Mr. Chavez. He used the privacy of his California office to frequently molest Ms. Murguia, she said. He had known her since she was 8 years old. She became so traumatized that she attempted to end her life multiple times by the age of 15.
How is it so many Democrat “community organizers” and “activists” turn out to be sexual predators? Those movements seem to draw them like flies to an open sewer…
Fallout: “Abbott Blocks Annual Cesar Chavez Observation in Texas.”
Samuel James Hall, a green card holder from Great Britain, appeared in federal court on a misdemeanor charge of voting by an alien. According to his defense attorney, James Alston, Hall has lived in the Houston area for several years but is not a U.S. citizen. Federal prosecutors allege he cast a ballot in Harris County during the 2024 General Election, voting in races for president, vice president, U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives. The charge carries a maximum penalty of one year in federal prison. Hall posted bond and is free while his case moves through court.
“Former MD Anderson Researcher Pleads Guilty To Stealing Cancer Research for China.” “Harris County court records show that Yunhai Li pleaded guilty on March 6 to a state jail felony charge of attempted theft of trade secrets. He was recently sentenced to 364 days in the Harris County jail and received credit for 196 days already served, indicating a remaining time in jail of 168 days. Court records indicate Li, 35, is expected to be deported upon release.” (Previously.)
After paying Bari Weiss $150 million for The Free Press and hiring her to run their newsroom, CBS News announced a fresh round of layoffs on Friday which will affect over 60 jobs, or 6% of the news division, according to the NY Times.
“Certain parts of this newsroom need to get smaller in order for us to make room for the things that we need to build to remain competitive in the future,” said Weiss, who entered the scene last October, during a Friday newsroom-wide conference call.
The move follows roughly 100 layoffs last year, while ratings have continued to plummet under Weiss.
Today’s round includes the entirety of CBS News Radio – a century-old division that “served as the foundation for everything we have built since 1927,” said network president Tom Cibrowski in a memo.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess the average CBS Radio news listener age is around 85…
After decades of relying on Vietnam-era designs, the Army has approved the first offensive hand grenade to enter the service since 1968.
The new M111 Offensive Hand Grenade was approved for full material release this year, the Army announced Tuesday in a statement. The new grenade relies primarily on blast overpressure rather than fragmented inner pieces to incapacitate, making it better suited for close-quarters combat inside of buildings, bunkers and tunnels.
Full material release allows the Army to field the weapon across the force after testing has confirmed that it meets safety and performance requirements. The approval lets the Army move the grenade from development into production.
The Army’s standard M67 fragmentation grenade explodes shrapnel in all directions, making it risky for soldiers to use in tight spaces. Blast overpressure refers to the intense pressure wave created by an explosion.
“One of the key lessons learned from the door-to-door urban fighting in Iraq was the M67 grenade wasn’t always the right tool for the job. The risk of fratricide on the other side of the wall was too high,” said Col. Vince Morris, the Army’s project manager for Close Combat Systems, in the statement. But a weapon utilizing blast overpressure instead of fragmentation, he said, “can clear a room of enemy combatants quickly leaving nowhere to hide while ensuring the safety of friendly forces.”
The M111 is intended to replace the body and fuze of the Mk3A2 grenade series, which has an asbestos body that has restricted its use. Unlike the Mk3A2, the new weapon has a plastic casing that is consumed during detonation.
It also uses the same fuze system as the M67 grenade, allowing the service to streamline manufacturing.
With 310 meters in length and roughly 90 meters at the beam, the 80,000-tonne France Libre will dwarf its predecessor, the 42,000-tonne Charles de Gaulle, which has served as the Marine Nationale‘s sole carrier strike platform since 2001. Power will come from a pair of TechnicAtome K-22 pressurized water reactors, granting the vessel virtually unlimited range and endurance at speeds of up to 27 knots via three shaft lines. Crew complement (including air wing) is set to be about 2,000 sailors.
They’re targeting it to be ready for service in 2038.
Insane story out of Houston: “Armed Man Wearing Tactical Gear Arrested for Attempted Entry to Klein Elementary School.”
A 39-year-old man in tactical gear, armed with a handgun and taser, attempted entry to Zwink Elementary in Klein Independent School District (ISD) on March 10.
Kyle Chris lives four minutes away from the school and was arrested on the evening of March 11, more than 24 hours after the incident. He has a felony charge of unlawfully carrying a weapon in a prohibited place.
District officials say Chris was able to enter an initial set of front doors during a 15-second period after a parent entered and before the doors shut completely. Zwink Elementary’s double-door system kept Chris in the entrance and stopped him from entering the area of the school with access to students.
But the story gets even more insane: “Kyle Chris” turns out to be “Muhi Mohanad Najm” and Democrat Judge Lori Chambers Gray bonded him out for $75K.
Talking about the Bible on a bus in Austin? That’s a stabbing. Boy, Steve Adler’s decision to lure drug addicted transients to Austin, and Jose Garza’s determination to keep violent lunatics on the streets, just keep paying dividends.
Among the numerous things he predicted incorrectly:
In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death [from mass famine].
This was, of course, entirely false. It did not happen. It is hard to overstate how wrong this was. Indeed, after the communist-run Great Leap Forward famine in 1950s-1960s China, major famines have become a vanishing rarity on the global stage
Snip.
Elsewhere, in a comical essay that presented itself as being written from the future, Ehrlich claimed the U.S. population in 1999 would be around 22 million, the result of a famine-induced “Great Die-Off.”
There is a personality type that every institution eventually learns to fear. Not the whistleblower. Not the activist. Not the dissident. Those are legible threats. They want something. They have an agenda. They can be categorized, managed, countered, discredited.
The personality the institution cannot process is the person who corrects errors because they are errors.
Not because the correction serves their interests. Not because they are aligned against the people who made the error. Not because they are building a case or advancing a cause or positioning themselves for advantage. Because the error exists. Because it is wrong. Because someone published a number that is not the right number, and the wrong number is sitting there, propagating, being cited, being absorbed, being built upon, and nobody is fixing it.
This person will spend three hours writing a detailed correction of a statistical claim in a policy document that has nothing to do with their field, their career, their politics, or their life. They will do this for free. They will do it knowing that the correction will make them no friends and several enemies. They will do it on a Saturday. They will do it again the following Tuesday when they find another error in a different document.
If you ask them why, the answer is: because it’s wrong.
That answer is incomprehensible to most institutional actors. And the incomprehension is the beginning of the immune response.
It’s not our job to make sure nVidia’s fucking shit lands. It’s my job to identify when their shit has not landed and has, in fact, remained suspended in mid-air. It’s not a great metaphor. And I guess I say it’s not our job, but that’s not really true; they’re the entire economy. We all work for them, in a literal way. The rational play here is to suck as many dicks as possible, and to suck them on an industrial scale. We might suck a dick here, a dick there, but we need to be thinking about these firm rods like a Henry Ford or a Ray Croc. You better clap to keep this fucking fairy alive or your gramma is gonna have to live in a hedge like a witch.
I saw impressive environmental lighting for sure, but that’s not what punched people in the gut. All people did was respond viscerally to Grace Ashcroft. That’s not who she is. We had an uncanny valley, and now we have… I dunno. An “Eerie Mesa.” We don’t like that either. And when I say we don’t like it, I mean our bones don’t like it. There’s a Eurogamer article on nVidia’s response, which is to say that we don’t know everything and are thinking about it wrong, which is a great pitch. I talked to Gabe a couple years ago about how eventually nVidia would just… do it. Do it all, do the whole shebang. Expound mathemagically on base assets and shim the whole thing. I wish I’d said so at the time! I could link back to it, and simply deploy the Lemmy Face. In the meantime, it’s not clear to me that the developers I’m interested in are gonna feel like jacking this thing off until their game doesn’t look scary.
Speaking of people rejecting scary faces, Meta is closing down it’s virtual realty project after pouring $80 billion on it. Or saying they lost $80 billion so they can rake off the money somewhere else…
Mark Felton has a fun video up covering Marlene Dietrich’s guns she brought back after entertaining U.S. troops in Europe during World War II, including gifts from Omar Bradley and George S. Patton!
Dune Part 3 trailer drops. The difficulty here is that Parts 1 and 2 were made from Dune, which is a great novel, where this is made from Dune Messiah, which isn’t. Indeed, Dune Messiah takes place after Muad’Dib’s jihad has swept the galaxy, and it looks like there will be a lot more jihad in the movie than the book. I’m guessing this is the rare case where the movie may be better than the book.
Iran Strikes: Day 14, lots of counter-drone measures, more welfare state fraud in California and Pennsylvania, a bishop raids the children’s fund, a new refinery rises in Brownsville, Old Glory 1, dirty antifa commie 0, caffeine is good for your brain, BuzzardFeed, and the cutest hotel greeters. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Donald Trump said that he thinks new Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father, the former supreme leader, was killed on the first day of the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, is alive but “damaged.”
Khamenei has not been seen by Iranians since his selection on Sunday by a clerical assembly, and his first comments were read out by a television presenter on Thursday.
An Iranian official told Reuters on Wednesday that the newly appointed supreme leader was lightly injured but was continuing to operate, after state television described him as war-wounded.
“I think he probably is (alive). I think he is damaged, but I think he’s probably alive in some form, you know,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News’ “The Brian Kilmeade Show.” His remarks were published by Fox News late on Thursday.
Military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island – the loading site for most of the Islamic Republic’s oil exports – were “totally obliterated” by US airstrikes during a historic bombing raid in the Persian Gulf, President Trump announced Friday.
“Moments ago, at my direction, the United States Central Command executed one of the most powerful bombing raids in the History of the Middle East, and totally obliterated every MILITARY target in Iran’s crown jewel, Kharg Island,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The island, located about 16 miles off the Iranian coast, is one-third the size of Manhattan and controls 90% of Iranian crude oil exports.
Trump said the island’s oil infrastructure was not targeted but may be hit in future strikes, if the Iranian regime doesn’t allow ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
Most IRGC facilities have been bombed into oblivion, but the IRGC is still functioning as a Secret Police force, threatening Iranians with death if they take to the streets to protest or rise up against the regime.
Snip.
Iranian state media claim the overnight strikes on Basij checkpoints were meant to stir unrest inside the country.
“This is an attempt to undermine public confidence in Iran’s stable security apparatus. The enemy is trying to open a new internal front,” one outlet said.
Fars news agency reported that at least 10 security and Basij personnel were killed in attacks at several sites across Tehran.
At this point, the crucial war-winning strategy is to destroy the IRGC’s ability to intimidate a populace desperate to get rid of them.
loitering munition-type drones now appear to be operating over Tehran.
More than 10 checkpoints, as well as several mobile IRGC (IRGC) military vehicles in different areas of the city, are said to have been targeted and destroyed by drone strikes. (@etelaf10)
This type of weapon can patrol for a long time over an area, wait for targets to appear, and then strike. This is all the easier when enemy air defense systems are degraded or neutralized.
This could facilitate the emergence of a broader national uprising, by weakening the regime’s control at the street level.
Uncle Sam cues up more Whoop Ass: “The USS Tripoli, and the 2,500 Marines on the amphibious assault ship, are headed to the Middle East to bolster U.S. military power there as the war in Iran enters its third week.” Maybe they’ll be occupying Kharg Island in the near future, and we’ll let China beg us to sell them Iranian oil…
Iran also attacked a refinery in northern Iraq. Maybe Iran is trying to see if they can survive as a state that exports nothing but terror…
Communist China is facing a devastating energy crisis as massive gas lines stretch for miles across the country, with desperate Hong Kong residents rushing across the border to fill their tanks amid fears that escalating war with Iran could cripple global oil supplies.
The scenes coming out of China paint a picture of panic and desperation — exactly what happens when authoritarian regimes fail to secure reliable energy for their people. While President Trump’s America First energy policies have made us energy independent, China’s reliance on hostile nations like Iran has left them vulnerable and scrambling.
Hong Kong citizens, already suffering under Beijing’s iron fist, are now forced to join endless queues just to get basic fuel for their vehicles. The images are reminiscent of the Carter administration’s gas crisis — a stark reminder of what happens when nations don’t prioritize energy independence.
The Carter-era gas lines weren’t from a shortage of supply, they were from the federal government’s monkeying with allocation.
Medicare is federally administered, and hospices must be certified for reimbursements. But the state issues the licenses for hospices to operate.
Three years ago, California’s state auditor sounded the alarm that Los Angeles County had seen a 1,500% increase in hospice companies since 2010 – more than six times the national average relative to its elderly population.
Auditors estimated LA County hospices overbilled Medicare by $105 million in a single year.
The state revoked 280 hospice licenses, but things have only gotten worse since then.
The CBS News analysis reveals that over 700 of the roughly 1,800 hospices in LA County trigger multiple red flags for fraud as defined by the state.
It goes downhill from there:
There are about 1,800 licensed hospices in Los Angeles County, California, which is more than six times the national average for the county’s senior population.
Nearly 500 hospices are operating within a 3-mile radius, the densest concentration of agencies in the county.
89 companies are registered to a single building in Van Nuys.
The illegal alien voter fraud that Democrats swear up and down never happens happened again. “ICE arrests illegal migrant who allegedly fraudulently voted in seven federal elections.”
The Department of Homeland Security has announced the arrest of an illegal migrant who allegedly voted in seven federal elections since 2008, despite being deported over 20 years ago.
DHS said Mahady Sacko, who came to the United States illegally from the African country of Mauritania, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and the FBI in Philadelphia. He has been charged with voter fraud.
“This criminal illegal alien committed a felony by voting in federal elections dating back to 2008.”
If you’re waiting in long lines at the airport, you can thank Democrats love of illegal aliens. “Democrats Block DHS Funding Despite Airport Delays, Rising Iranian Threat.”
Senate Democrats have blocked another test vote on Thursday, pushed by Republicans attempting to end the ongoing 27-day partial government shutdown impacting the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Republican leaders contend that Democrat lawmakers refuse to negotiate in good faith and are only interested in abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a subagency under DHS.
Nairobi-based contractors have seen footage capturing bathroom visits, naked people, and intimate moments, according to an investigation from two Swedish newspapers.
That’s right. This report from the newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten claims Meta is outsourcing video to Sama, a tech firm in KENYA, where human workers pore over millions of hours of video to help train Meta’s A.I. assistant that is paired with the glasses.
See, A.I. isn’t really A.I. That’s just a marketing label. These programs are Large-Language Models (LLMs) that can search and summarize vast quantities of data in a split second, but they require an army of human input to train them so they can provide accurate answers to users. Once the programs run out of data provided by humans, they stall out.
Sama was also used by OpenAI to train its LLM. Why? Well, labor in Africa is CHEAP. If you can pay thousands of workers $2 an hour instead of $30 an hour to train your overhyped search bot, you save billions of dollars.
The other advantage is anonymity … for the companies, that is. If you were paying Americans to watch videos of fellow Americans undressing and having sex, they would probably report it to the media en masse.
What a shock that Facebook “smart glasses” are simply another way to invade your privacy…
“HUGE Storm Shadow Strike on Bryansk Electronics Factory.” Plus a look at the aftermath. “90-94% of its production goes into Russian weapons – semiconductors, circuit boards, power modules for missiles, radars, drones, aircraft and more.” And as we know, Russia has very little in the way of semiconductor production.
Russian planes can barely fly in the right direction. They are catching fire in midair. Technical failures are increasing. Emergency landings are happening one after another…There is a dramatic increase in both military and civilian plane crashes.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians are now afraid to even buy tickets. Flights are being postponed indefinitely. This is not a scene from a disaster movie. These images are from Russia.
And for millions of people, airports are now like giant open air prisons. The collapse of the system has reached such a terrifying scale that it can no longer be hidden.
A good bit of this was predicted when sanctions against Russian aviation came down in 2022.
Then there’s the story of civilians flown on an unheated military cargo plane in sub-zero temperatures…
Stephen Green: “I Have Seen the Future of Anti-Drone Warfare, and It’s Dirt-Cheap (Really!)”
Today’s news about Ukraine’s Sting counter-drone caught my eye, and what it might mean for U.S. and other Western forces going forward.
I vaguely remembered reading something about the Sting a year or more ago, but I just learned today that they’re both dirt-cheap and extremely effective — mostly at shooting down Russia’s Geran-2 one-way attack drones, which are licensed copies of Iran’s Shahed that have caused us considerable trouble in Operation Epic Fury.
Ukraine needs tons of these things, because Geran is essentially a terror weapon aimed in large numbers — currently 100 to 200 per attack — at Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. Larger attack waves include anything from 300 up to just over 800 Geran-2s in one night.
So the concept behind Sting is simply enough: Make something cheap and fast to build, easy to use, yet still capable of knocking a Geran-2 out of the sky far enough out from its target for some degree of safety.
And a local startup firm called Wild Hornets delivered on all three counts.
A typical quadcopter design and just over a foot tall, Stings are made mostly from 3D-printed parts and can be assembled in about two minutes. Unlike some drones that must be launched into the air via catapult (really), Sting takes off vertically like a helicopter before tipping over and using its stubby wings to fly like a plane, with an intercept range of 15 miles or so. Vertical takeoff allows operators to deploy and launch in less than 15 minutes.
The Ukes designed themselves a mini Osprey. That goes boom. Nifty.
There’s a camera on board, which the operator then uses to fly into incoming Geran-2s. With a top speed of about 190 MPH, they’re fast enough to enjoy a reported 80-90% successful intercept rate — and better than 90% in more recent operations. There’s a faster — and presumably more difficult to intercept — jet-powered Geran-3, but they’re much more expensive to build, require more fuel, and have shorter range. Russia uses far fewer of those.
The best part of Sting? The basic model costs about $2,500 to manufacture, compared to an estimated $70k–$80k for each Russian-built Geran-2. The economics of mass drone warfare are brutal.
A federal jury in Philadelphia has delivered a resounding guilty verdict against two Pennsylvania brothers and a longtime associate, convicting them of masterminding one of the most elaborate and prolonged racketeering operations uncovered in recent years. The scheme, which prosecutors say drained more than $32 million from Pennsylvania’s Medicaid program while exploiting vulnerable foreign workers through the H-1B visa system, spanned over a decade and involved layers of deception across multiple states.
At the center of the criminal enterprise – self-dubbed the “Savani Group” – were brothers Bhaskar Savani, 60, a trained dentist from Ambler, Pennsylvania, and Arun Savani, 58, from Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. Bhaskar controlled the group’s extensive network of dental practices, while Arun oversaw finances and real estate holdings. Together, they built what U.S. Attorney David Metcalf described as a “complex web” of sham entities and fraudulent operations, amassing tens of millions through outright fraud “at every turn.”
A third defendant, Aleksandra “Ola” Radomiak, 48, of Lansdale, Pennsylvania—a longtime associate—was also convicted for her role, primarily in the healthcare fraud components.
The multi-faceted conspiracy encompassed several interlocking schemes:
Visa fraud and worker exploitation: The group filed numerous false H-1B visa petitions with the U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. These applications misrepresented job titles, duties, and other details to bring in foreign workers—most from India—who were dependent on the Savani Group for their legal status. Once employed, many were coerced into kicking back portions of their salaries and paying additional fees back to the enterprise, creating a captive, underpaid workforce.
Healthcare fraud against Medicaid: After the Savani Group’s legitimate dental practices lost their Medicaid contracts due to prior issues, the conspirators pivoted to using nominee-owned shell entities and sham dental practices. They fraudulently billed Pennsylvania Medicaid in the names of non-treating dentists for services that were either unnecessary, never performed, or grossly inflated. This alone resulted in over $32 million in improper payments, robbing taxpayers and depriving the healthcare system of vital resources.
Money laundering and tax evasion: Proceeds from the fraud were funneled through a sophisticated network of financial transactions, including concealment and transactional money laundering. The group also conspired to defraud the U.S. Treasury via wire fraud tied to false tax returns.
Obstruction of justice: When federal investigators closed in, the conspirators actively obstructed a grand jury probe.
Two cooperating government witnesses, Lynette Sharp and Seth Sikes, both pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support to terrorists and testified against [Benjamin] Song.
Sharp alleged Song admitted to shooting someone when she helped him evade law enforcement after the officer was shot.
Likewise, Sikes alleged that Song said, “Get to the rifles,” and testified he heard gunshots coming from behind him where Song was and turned to see a muzzle flash.
Sharp met Song in 2022, and Sikes met him in 2024 while Song was teaching martial arts at a Fort Worth community center.
Both witnesses testified that they became friends with the defendants.
“I love them,” Sharp said on the stand, after wiping tears.
Sikes testified he and others trusted Song, whom he described as a “very charismatic person” that people would follow.
Cameron Arnold (also known as Autumn Hill), Zachary Evetts, Bradford Morris (also known as Meagan Morris), Maricela Rueda, and Song face the most serious charges of attempted murder, discharging a firearm during a crime of violence, and providing material support to terrorists.
Other defendants facing lesser charges include Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto, and Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada.
All have pleaded not guilty.
Sharp and Sikes said group members considered themselves victims of society or those who wanted to protect “marginalized” people.
This ideology led them to become caught up in protest culture, offering a rare glimpse into the inner workings of protestors known as Antifa.
Antifa is modeled after a group that worked as the violent arm of the Communist Party in Germany in the 1930s. Some symbols from the original group are still used by the movement today, such as the logo and the raised-fist salute.
Song, who received an “other than honorable” discharge from the Army, recruited Sharp and Sikes to train with the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), often described as a left-wing alternative to counter the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Sharp and Sikes said they learned gun safety and practiced marksmanship. Various defendants in the Antifa case frequently trained with AR-style weapons, they said.
The First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals lifted a block Wednesday on a lower court ruling that prevented the Trump administration from deporting illegal migrants to “third countries” that are willing to accept them.
The Trump administration had appealed U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy’s ruling last week, after he ruled in February that the Department of Homeland Security’s deportation policy was unlawful and violates due process protections under the U.S. Constitution.
The administration argued Murphy’s order violated two previous Supreme Court rulings and created an “unworkable scheme” that threatened to derail negotiations with other countries, along with thousands of deportations, per Fox News.
California’s climate-cult-driven political leaders assumed gasoline demand would fade quickly as electric vehicles took hold. Acting on that prediction, they created conditions that forced refineries to close, blocked new projects, and added regulations expecting everyone would share their disdain for fossil fuels and reliable internal combustion engines.
But reality didn’t match their models. Tens of millions of drivers still rely on gasoline every day, and by shrinking supply faster than demand declined, our eco-activist bureaucrats created a fragile, high‑risk system.
Californians are being warned to brace themselves for the FO phase of the FAFO cycle.
Gavin Newsom’s green agenda and global oil turmoil will risk sending California’s gas prices above a wallet-crushing $8 a gallon — potentially returning drivers to the desperate fuel rationing not seen since the 1970s, state lawmakers and industry experts warned.
With drivers in the Golden State already facing the highest gas prices in the US, Southern California state Sen. Suzette Valladares has urged the governor to scrap California’s cap-and-invest program that charges oil makers for carbon emissions. She dubbed Newsom’s program the “cap-and-tax” scheme, and warned that closing any further oil refineries in the state could trigger economic collapse.
“It’s not scaremongering at all,” Valladares told The California Post of a report from the USC Marshall School of Business that found gas prices could reach $8 a gallon by the end of 2026.
The way things are going, it wouldn’t shock me to see California gas prices hit $8 a gallon this month…
Things that make you go “Hmmmm“: “FBI secretly seizes election records from Arizona’s largest county as voting probe expands.”
The FBI is expanding its criminal probe into suspected election irregularities, secretly obtaining a large tranche of voting records from Arizona’s largest county with a recent grand jury subpoena, multiple people familiar with the probe told Just the News.
The sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury probe, said FBI agents are receiving terabytes of electronic election data from Maricopa County, about a month after the bureau first disclosed an investigation into election irregularities by raiding a warehouse near Atlanta and seizing ballots from the 2020 election conducted in Fulton County, Georgia’s largest metropolis.
The subpoena comes five years after the GOP-led Arizona state Senate conducted a lengthy investigation into the 2020 election and concluded there were significant irregularities.
“As Democrats make anti-ICE messaging a centerpiece of their midterm election strategy, a new NBC poll shows that the Democratic Party is more unpopular than ICE. Of the 14 subjects surveyed—a list that also included “AI, that is Artificial Intelligence”—only Iran had a lower approval rating than the Democratic Party.”
Chairman and CEO Darren Woods said about the decision, “Texas has made a noticeable effort to embrace the business community. In doing so, it has created a policy and regulatory environment that can allow the company to maximize shareholder value.”
Its attraction to the state, according to ExxonMobil, is due in part to its de facto status as the company’s home, with 30 percent of the company’s global employee base and 75 percent of its domestic employee base located in Texas. The company is already headquartered in Spring.
“Texas’ legal and regulatory environment, including its modernized business statutes” was also referenced as a strategic reason for the relocation, along with the presence of the Texas Business Court, which ExxonMobil praised as “designed to resolve complex disputes efficiently.”
Thanks to Democrats’ soft on crime policies in California, not even luxury apartments are immune from rampaging mobs.
A group linked to a late-night street takeover forced its way into a luxury downtown Los Angeles apartment tower early Sunday, fighting with staff and leaving shattered glass and overturned furniture behind, according to police and video of the incident, according to the NY Post.
The disturbance happened around 3 a.m. at the Circa LA Apartments on South Figueroa Street, the Los Angeles Police Department said.
Authorities told KTLA that a crowd involved in a nearby street takeover moved toward the upscale high-rise and began vandalizing the property.
Video shows a large group gathering outside the building before targeting the lobby. One person is seen throwing an object at a suited employee who appeared to be working near the front desk. The worker initially stood outside but retreated inside as other staff gathered in the lobby.
The crowd soon forced its way into the building. Outside, several people smashed glass doors and windows, while one individual used a metal barricade to ram the entrance.
The Post writes that once inside, members of the group knocked over furniture and ran through the lobby as the scene descended into chaos. At one point, a person appeared to grab a box from the front desk while others rummaged through it before the group dispersed as sirens approached.
This is your city on Democrats…
“Michigan rep not seeking reelection because she can’t “be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ while remaining a member of the Democratic Party.” “Michigan State Representative Karen Whitsett announced she will not seek re-election and will not run for public office again, saying the decision is faith-based and rooted in her commitment to Jesus Christ and the authority of Scripture.”
I have compromised my relationship with Jesus for too long, and I’m grateful God did not give up on me. He gave me time to repent, turn, and be fully devoted to Him
That conviction includes the issues I cannot reconcile with Scripture: abortion, the normalization of the gay lifestyle, and the push to redefine gender.
Pope Leo XIV accepts San Diego bishop’s resignation over embezzlement scandal. Bishop Emanuel Shaleta stepped down from his post at Saint Peter’s Chaldean last month, the Vatican said in a bulletin Tuesday. Bishop Saad Hanna Sirop has replaced him in the interim.”
Shaleta has been charged with eight counts of embezzlement, eight counts of money laundering, and an “aggravated white collar crime” enhancement related to $272,000 in missing funds from the church, according to NBC News, and pleaded not guilty to all charges during a court appearance Monday.
Authorities allege that Shaleta spent months pocketing $30,000 in monthly cash payments from a tenant and hid the crime by moving money from a church account that held funds to help the less fortunate into the church’s operations account.
“PM who ran New Zealand into the ground during Covid flees country for greener pastures.” Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who locked down harder and longer than just about any other country, has emigrated to Australia. Hopefully a Bunyip or Drop Bear will eat her…
BlackRock is like a roach motel: Your money can check in, but it can never check out. “BlackRock (NYSE:BLK) is blocking investors from fully exiting its $26 billion HPS Corporate Lending Fund after redemption requests hit 9.3% of shares in Q1, well above the fund’s 5% quarterly cap. It marks the first time withdrawal requests have exceeded that limit.”
“Trump Set To Suspend Jones Act To Help Tame Oil Prices.” The century old Jones Act “that requires American-built ships to be used to transport goods between US ports.” I’m sure that right now Peter Zeihan is already working on a video to celebrate…
Unexpected South Carolina Democrat senate candidate Alvin Greene, RIP. They didn’t even mention his comic book…
Speaking of novelty candidates, Literally Anybody Else is running for mayor of North Richland Hills, a Metroplex city northeast of Fort Worth. That’s the name of the guy running: Literally Anybody Else. His cause for running against incumbent mayor Jack McCarty is “lying to the people about carport regulations.”
Ian McCollum examines whether force reset triggers will destroy the value of existing legal-to-own machine guns. The answer, from recent auction results, is probably not. Particularly eye-opening is two registered drop-in auto-sears, which allow conversion of certain modern sporting rifles to full-auto, went for $40,000 and $52,000. For what is essentially a stamped bit of metal.
Rick Beato has a theory that all those people building AI data centers are going to go bankrupt, because people can run AI tools and datasets on their own computers. He compares this to how recording studios who had borrowed money to buy expensive mixing boards circa 1999 went out of business when Napster crashed the music business. I think his larger point is correct, but I think a lot of musicians were already already into cheaper prosumer digital tools in the early 1990s.
Finally, my excessive Diet Dr Pepper habit is paying off! “Large Study Shows High Caffeine Intake Linked To Reduced Dementia Risk.”
BuzzFeed is buzzard feed. “BuzzFeed, the digital media empire that captured the attention of millennials in the mid-2010s through shareable listicles, viral video content and more, expressed ‘substantial doubt’ Thursday about its ability to continue operations.”
(Hat tip: Clownfish TV, from whom I’ve stolen the buzzard feed line.)
Critical Drinker is considerably less than impressed with The Bride! “Jesus Fuck Mothering Christ. I have seen a lot of crappy movies in my time, but I don’t think I’ve seen many that were so completely determined to waste such an insane amount of money and talent.”
Today’s Habitual Linecrosser:
“Aloha Snackbar.” I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that one before, but it’s still funny…
More Somali fraud in Minneapolis, Democrats have always been at war with Hamas, the Caspian Sea is no longer safe for Russian assets, Texas tops the U-Haul destination list (again), MST3K gets sold, and Scott Adams departs this simulation.
FA phase: “Somali Suitcase Stash: Feds say $130 million moved from Ohio airport to Minnesota on way overseas.”
Federal agents investigating a Somali immigrant operation that moved massive amounts of cash in suitcases from the Minneapolis airport to overseas have uncovered a new leg of the courier journey: the Columbus, Ohio airport.
Homeland Security Department officials told Just the News that Transportation Security Administration officers tracked and flagged about $136 million in bulk cash in outbound luggage at the passenger checkpoints at John Glenn Columbus International Airport since November 2023.
The cash movements were made by U.S. citizens of Somali origin who flew out of the Columbus airport en route to either the airports in Minneapolis or Atlanta, and the couriers always declared the cash as legally required on documents, officials said.
“Typically, when they go to Minneapolis, they drop off the cash and then a subsequent courier travels abroad from Minneapolis to Dubai through Amsterdam,” one official familiar with the investigation told Just the News on Tuesday, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
The officials said they appear to have uncovered a massive cash movement operation that gathered money from multiple Somali immigrant communities in the West, Midwest and South that eventually brought luggage filled with currency to Minneapolis for flights overseas.
Just the News reported exclusively last week that TSA detected nearly $700 million in cash in luggage leaving the Minneapolis airport in 2024 and 2025, frequently headed on a route to Amsterdam and then Dubai where U.S. officials lost the tracking. The TSA agents routinely alerted investigators during the Biden years, but there was little interest in probing the money movements further until President Donald Trump took office last year.
Find Out phase beginning: “Congress moving quickly to investigate cash-in-luggage exodus from U.S. airports. Sen. Rand Paul also revealed that federal agents are probing the massive cash transfers that move through a network centered in the Minneapolis airport.”
Federal agents investigating a Somali immigrant operation that moved massive amounts of cash in suitcases from the Minneapolis airport to overseas have uncovered a new leg of the courier journey: the Columbus, Ohio airport.
Homeland Security Department officials told Just the News that Transportation Security Administration officers tracked and flagged about $136 million in bulk cash in outbound luggage at the passenger checkpoints at John Glenn Columbus International Airport since November 2023.
The cash movements were made by U.S. citizens of Somali origin who flew out of the Columbus airport en route to either the airports in Minneapolis or Atlanta, and the couriers always declared the cash as legally required on documents, officials said.
“Typically, when they go to Minneapolis, they drop off the cash and then a subsequent courier travels abroad from Minneapolis to Dubai through Amsterdam,” one official familiar with the investigation told Just the News on Tuesday, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
The officials said they appear to have uncovered a massive cash movement operation that gathered money from multiple Somali immigrant communities in the West, Midwest and South that eventually brought luggage filled with currency to Minneapolis for flights overseas.
And the fraud isn’t limited to Minnesota: “Two scammers plead guilty to $68M Brooklyn adult day care fraud scheme.”
Two Brooklyn scammers pleaded guilty on Thursday to defrauding a whopping $68 million from the state’s controversial Medicaid home care program by paying health care kickbacks for services they didn’t provide at three Big Apple businesses.
Manal Wasef and Elaine Antao, both 46, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud for referring Medicaid recipients to two Brooklyn social adult day cares and a home health company in exchange for illegal kickbacks and bribes, the US Department of Justice announced on Thursday.
The latest iteration of the Democratic Party’s color-revolution-style operation was on full display in recent days as tensions erupted following the fatal shooting of a left-wing activist by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent during a federal enforcement sweep in Minnesota. This incident demonstrates that the protest industrial complex, funded by left-wing billionaires, has been on standby, waiting for a catalyzing event to ignite mass mobilization.
MSM, the Democratic Party, and left-wing nonprofits are working hard to manufacture another ‘George Floyd’-type protest or riot by omitting key context about the woman shot and killed by an ICE agent. They conveniently left out her social justice “warrior” role in Minneapolis, including her reported involvement with “ICE Watch” and other operations to disrupt ICE raids in the sanctuary city. These details matter because MSM attempted to manufacture an outrage news cycle, while nonprofits create artificial multi-city protests aimed at shifting public opinion on ICE operations nationwide.
More find out: “Trump Threatens To Invoke Insurrection Act As Left-Wing Chaos In Minneapolis Spreads.”
This is a good question: “Why did all the Dems suddenly become anti-Hamas over the weekend?”
Something very weird happened with the Democrats this past weekend.
I first noticed when I saw this post on X from Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois which was, let’s just say, not exactly subtle.
Apropos of apparently nothing, we’re getting a Shabbat Shalom from Pritzker on a random Friday night. That by itself that would be odd, but whatever.
A whole lot of Democrats followed suit in their 180:
Videos like that are a dime a dozen. If you’ve followed the anti-Israel campus protests over the past 2 years, you’ve seen leftwing mobs openly supporting Hamas proudly and loudly. Democrat politicians, meanwhile, have unequivocally supported the Palestinian Authority and Gaza Health Ministry, which are controlled entirely by Hamas. The support was so strong and so unanimous that Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania made headlines for breaking party lines with his support of Israel!
Legal Insurrection on a similarly mysterious flip. “Having Flipped Against Hamas, Dem Pols In Unison Now Back Iranian Protesters.”
Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.
We covered how Democrats politicians in unison and contrary to every message they’re sent since the October 7 Massacre, declared that public support for Hamas was unacceptable and antisemitic. We asked, What’s Behind the Democrats’ Sudden Pivot on Hamas and Antisemitism?
The talking points just dropped.
Now they’re condemning Hamas.
The Democrats are pure phonies. pic.twitter.com/TUzc1ocsAJ
— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) January 10, 2026
I think it’s an election set up, they are going to use the “Woke Right” against Republicans not only in the 2026 midterms, but particularly if JD Vance is the Republican nominee in 2028. His proximity and friendship with Tucker Carlson and the Groypers will be a major Democrat theme, but that can’t work unless Democrats switch gears from their anti-Israel, pro-Hamas — and yes antisemitic — persona.
So they are up so to something. No one believes they had a change of heart.
And now Democrats have come out supporting the protesters in Iran, despite doing everything dating back to Obama to keep the Mullahs in power.
Snip.
Little history on AOC and Iran:
-She condemned Trump for killing top Iranian regime terrorist Qassem Soleimani
-She condemned Trump for blowing up Iran’s nuclear facilities
-She co-sponsored legislation to prevent the U.S. military from taking action against Iran
Did Iran’s check to Soros bounce? Or does Iran’s hyperinflation and currency collapse mean that they can no longer keep paying off useful idiots?
This account from a Venezuelan security guard loyal to Nicolás Maduro is absolutely chilling—and it explains a lot about why the tone across Latin America suddenly changed.
Security Guard: On the day of the operation, we didn’t hear anything coming. We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation. The next thing we saw were drones, a lot of drones, flying over our positions. We didn’t know how to react.
Interviewer: So what happened next? How was the main attack?
Security Guard: After those drones appeared, some helicopters arrived, but there were very few. I think barely eight helicopters. From those helicopters, soldiers came down, but a very small number. Maybe twenty men. But those men were technologically very advanced. They didn’t look like anything we’ve fought against before.
Interviewer: And then the battle began?
Security Guard: Yes, but it was a massacre. We were hundreds, but we had no chance. They were shooting with such precision and speed… it seemed like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute. We couldn’t do anything.
Interviewer: And your own weapons? Didn’t they help?
Security Guard: No help at all. Because it wasn’t just the weapons. At one point, they launched something—I don’t know how to describe it… it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.
Interviewer: And your comrades? Did they manage to resist?
Security Guard: No, not at all. Those twenty men, without a single casualty, killed hundreds of us. We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.
Interviewer: So do you think the rest of the region should think twice before confronting the Americans?
Security Guard: Without a doubt. I’m sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States. They have no idea what they’re capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They’re not to be messed with.
Interviewer: And now that Trump has said Mexico is on the list, do you think the situation will change in Latin America?
Security Guard: Definitely. Everyone is already talking about this. No one wants to go through what we went through. Now everyone thinks twice. What happened here is going to change a lot of things, not just in Venezuela but throughout the region.
Judicial Watch sued in 2025 to clean up Oregon’s voter rolls.
Confirmed by Portland’s Willamette Week, Secretary of State Tobias Read is now cleaning up those records, and the scope of the clean-up is HUGE.
That process could lead to the cancellation of as many as 800,000 registrations. That’s the number of voters Read says are currently classified as ‘inactive’ on the voter rolls. To be clear, inactive voters do not receive ballots, but their names remain on the rolls.
The cleanup comes as Oregon’s first-in-the-nation vote-by-mail system is under intense scrutiny. President Donald Trump, who blamed mail-in ballots, among other bogeymen, for his defeat in 2020, has amplified historical criticism of Oregon’s system.
There’s nuance here. Essentially, because these voters haven’t cast a ballot in a certain number of years, they no longer get a handy-dandy mail-in ballot sent directly to their home.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t vote, or that they haven’t been involved in some level of electoral shenanigans.
There are reportedly 167,000 people who haven’t voted since 2017 and will be taken off the rolls beginning this month. Another 640,000 are classified as inactive and will be reviewed after that.
Remember that in 2024 President Trump only lost Oregon by some 320,000 votes…
For the first time in 50 years, the U.S. experienced negative net migration in 2025 because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal border crossings and heightened deportation efforts, an enormous victory for the White House as it faces renewed backlash against its heavy-handed enforcement tactics.
The U.S. had net migration of -10,000 to -295,000 due to a combination of deportations, self-exits, and a significant drop in illegal immigration resulting from increased border security measures, according to a new Brookings Institution analysis. Those numbers represent a significant victory for President Trump, whose successful campaign focused primarily on his vow to reverse the record illegal immigration numbers facilitated by President Biden’s lax border policies.
Brookings observes a decline in green cards issued, refugee inflows, temporary visas, paroles and notices to appear, and entries without encountering a border official in 2025 due to the Trump administration’s stricter approach. Those trends will likely continue in 2026 as the administration tightens green card eligibility, further limits visa issuances, and continues to reject applications for asylum or refugee status.
The State Department announced Wednesday that it would pause immigrant visa processing from 75 countries “whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates,” the latest in a series of moves designed to decrease immigration from impoverished countries.
Funny what you can do when you actually obey the law and implement the desires of actual citizens rather than Democrat Party elites…
President Donald Trump put another dent in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement, withdrawing the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and 65 other international organizations dedicated to climate and social justice.
Trump’s order caps a recent trend in which many corporations have also canceled their decades-long commitments to left-wing global alliances, undermining what had been a highly influential worldwide movement that once included the world’s largest nations and companies.
According to a White House statement, Trump’s Jan. 7 executive order directs “all Executive Departments and Agencies to cease participating in and funding 35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities that operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty.”
On Jan. 8, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it would no longer provide funding to the Global Climate Fund, which financed many of the U.N.’s climate initiatives. The United States originally joined more than 190 other nations in the UNFCCC in 1992, when the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty.
This was followed by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which countries committed to CO2 limits and reduction targets, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, which accelerated national governments’ commitments and spending to reduce global temperatures. The U.S. Senate did not ratify either of these subsequent accords.
Thereafter, a number of net-zero corporate alliances emerged to align the private sector with climate initiatives. At its peak, this network included financial and corporate alliances, such as the Net Zero Banking Alliance, the Net Zero Insurance Alliance, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, and others.
These alliances operated under the umbrella of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a U.N.-backed multi-trillion-dollar coalition. The Glasgow Alliance focused on financial institutions because they were not only financiers but also dominant shareholders of publicly traded corporations, and thus a critical means of leverage over the private sector.
Net Zero Asset Managers members, for example, included BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, the world’s largest asset managers. These three firms alone are collectively the largest shareholders in more than 40 percent of publicly traded U.S. firms, and 88 percent of the S&P 500, according to a study by George Mason University business professors Sebahattin Demirkan and Ted Polat.
Over the past several years, however, members have begun to exit these organizations amid a conservative backlash and allegations of conflicts of interest and collusion. Much of this backlash occurred in conservative U.S. states, where Republican lawmakers, treasurers, and attorneys general launched boycotts and antitrust investigations of banks and fund managers accused of colluding against oil, gas, and coal companies and of violating their fiduciary duties to investors.
Vanguard quit Net Zero Asset Managers in 2022, and BlackRock quit in January 2025, after which the initiative announced it was suspending activities. In 2023, half of the Net Zero Insurance Alliance’s members quit en masse, facing risks of antitrust prosecution.
“Huge Missile/Drone Strike on Atlant Aero Drone Factory in Taganrog.” “This has been hit twice before.”
They hit the Nevinnomyssk Azot chemical plant with drones, and it’s been hit before. “It has the only units in Russia for the production of methylacetate and high purity acetic acid.”
Ukraine attacks four tankers with drones in the Black Sea. One wonder how much of Russia’s shadow fleet is even left…
Cargo ship Rona, possibly carrying weapons from Iran to Russia, sinks in the Caspian Sea. Looking at that rust bucket, you can well believe it sank without any help from Ukraine. Also, shouldn’t the mullahs be saving those weapons to use on their own people?
Despite breathless headlines warning of a robot takeover in the workforce, a new research briefing from Oxford Economics casts doubt on the narrative that artificial intelligence is currently causing mass unemployment. According to the firm’s analysis, “firms don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale,” suggesting instead that companies may be using the technology as a cover for routine headcount reductions.
In a January 7 report, the research firm argued that, while anecdotal evidence of job displacement exists, the macroeconomic data does not support the idea of a structural shift in employment caused by automation. Instead, it points to a more cynical corporate strategy: “We suspect some firms are trying to dress up layoffs as a good news story rather than bad news, such as past over-hiring.”
he primary motivation for this rebranding of job cuts appears to be investor relations. The report notes that attributing staff reductions to AI adoption “conveys a more positive message to investors” than admitting to traditional business failures, such as weak consumer demand or “excessive hiring in the past.” By framing layoffs as a technological pivot, companies can present themselves as forward-thinking innovators rather than businesses struggling with cyclical downturns.
In a recent interview, Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli told Fortune that he’s seen research about how, because markets typically celebrate news of job cuts, firms announce “phantom layoffs” that never actually occur. Companies were arbitraging the positive stock-market reaction to the news of a potential layoff, but “a few decades ago, the market stopped going up because [investors] started to realize that companies were not actually even doing the layoffs that they said they were going to do.”
When asked about the supposed link between AI and layoffs, Cappelli urged people to look closely at announcements. “The headline is, ‘It’s because of AI,’ but if you read what they actually say, they say, ‘We expect that AI will cover this work.’ Hadn’t done it. They’re just hoping. And they’re saying it because that’s what they think investors want to hear.”
“Trump greenlights Bill proposing 500% tariff over Russia oil trade. US Senator Lindsey Graham said the Russia sanctions bill will allow US President Donald Trump to punish countries that ‘buy cheap Russian oil, fueling Putin’s war machine.'” This seems aimed at India in particular.
The struggle over control of information, censorship, and economic dominance in the digital space is increasingly becoming a fundamental civilizational question. That the European Union now sees not only the EU Commission but also national governments and security apparatuses siding with information diktats, against the fundamental principle of free speech, sends a dangerous signal to the world. The EU has effectively withdrawn from the circle of freedom-oriented state actors.
Into this picture fits a recent report from Italy. A tweet by the founder and CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, has caused a stir.
Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any… pic.twitter.com/qZf9UKEAY5
Prince reports that Cloudflare has been hit with a $17 million fine by a — as he calls it — clandestine cabal in Italy. The accusation: Cloudflare refused to participate in an Italian censorship mechanism at the behest of this group.
Specifically, this concerns a system controlled by the Italian media authority AGCOM (Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni) called the “Piracy Shield.” This blocking system is officially aimed at combating illegal sports and media streaming services. The main targets are the economic interests of major players such as Italy’s Serie A football league, Sky Italia, DAZN, Mediaset, and other large European media and rights corporations.
Private actors, comparable to the so-called “Trusted Flaggers” now familiar in Germany, operate on behalf of the Italian media sector within this system. They report websites, IP addresses, or suspicious domains to the Piracy Shield. The authority then compels internet service providers and infrastructure operators like Cloudflare to implement the corresponding blocks within just 30 minutes. Every advertising minute counts; piracy is indeed a dangerously significant economic factor. The question is: How do states and affected companies enforce copyright? Do they operate under the rule of law and avoid collateral damage, such as backdoor state censorship?
According to Prince, all of this happens without a judicial order or prior review, bypassing due legal process entirely. The measures affect not only allegedly illegal content but also deeply intrude into the technical infrastructure of the internet.
“A middle school band director in the Abilene Independent School District has been busted for possessing child sexual abuse material. Lance Carl Mosley was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.”
“U-Haul Growth Index: Texas Back on Top as No. 1 Growth State of 2025. Florida ranks 2nd for net gain of one-way customers; California last for sixth year in a row.” (Hat tip: Ted Cruz on Facebook.)
Life in deep blue Seattle: “McDonald’s rolls out store ‘no door’ policy – and bans ALL diners from eating in…The McDonald’s restaurant is located in downtown Seattle and it has been nicknamed ‘McStabby’s.’ And, it is situated in an area that has been plagued with crime in recent years.” This is your city on Democrats…
Yes, Democrats are totally rational: “Nebraska Democrat, best known for filibustering trans surgery ban, rips down America 250 exhibits at Capitol.”
Cartoonist, author and political commentator Scott Adams died Tuesday after a battle with prostate cancer. He was 68.
His ex-wife and caregiver, Shelly, made the announcement on Adams’ livestream Tuesday morning.
“Unfortunately, this isn’t good news,” Shelly said. “Of course, he waited ’til just before the show started, but he’s not with us anymore.”
Shelly read aloud a “final message” that Adams “wanted to say” on the livestream.
“If you’re reading this, things did not go well for me,” the message began. “I have a few things to say before I go. My body fell before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this January 1, 2026.”
After speaking about Christianity, Adams’ message said, “For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent as a way to find meaning. That worked — but marriages don’t always last forever, and mine ended in a highly amicable way. I’m grateful for those years and the people I came to call my family.”
Snip.
In his last decade and a half, however, Adams achieved wide influence through his business advice and political analysis.
His 2013 best seller, “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big,” is one of the most influential and entertaining business books of recent years.
In it, Adams introduced the concept of using systems, rather than goals, to achieve success in life. He also advised readers to accumulate skills — a “talent stack” — rather than traditional credentials.
In 2015, Adams began commenting on politics after observing the first Republican presidential primary debate. When then-candidate Donald Trump responded to a moderator’s question that accused him of mistreating women by interjecting, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Adams took notice.
A trained hypnotist, Adams predicted that Trump, then a huge underdog, would win the nomination — and the presidency.
Adams drew ridicule for his bold claim. But he looked increasingly prescient as Trump dispensed with his opponents, the Republican establishment and — eventually — Hillary Clinton.
Adams used what he called the “persuasion filter”: Rather than judging whether political rhetoric was true or false, he simply evaluated it based on whether it was persuasive.
Snip.
While he excelled at explaining Trump’s tactics to a growing audience of Trump-supporting fans, Adams was also interested in explaining how Democrats, and the left-leaning media, interpreted events.
He explained that the country was often watching “two movies on one screen,” and argued — with great empathy for his opponents — that voters who felt genuinely frightened by Trump’s ascent had been led into an emotional cul-de-sac by cynical leaders.
Snip.
While he excelled at explaining Trump’s tactics to a growing audience of Trump-supporting fans, Adams was also interested in explaining how Democrats, and the left-leaning media, interpreted events.
He explained that the country was often watching “two movies on one screen,” and argued — with great empathy for his opponents — that voters who felt genuinely frightened by Trump’s ascent had been led into an emotional cul-de-sac by cynical leaders.
Leftists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome forget just how funny and influential Dilbert was, and would have done much better listening to Adams’ explanation of how Trump works than their continuing full bore freakout. But that wouldn’t let them assuage their wounded ego with the certainty that they’re simply smarter and better people than Trump and his his deplorable followers in JesusLand…
Radial Entertainment, the entertainment company formed from the merger of Shout! Studios and FilmRise, has obtained full ownership over the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” brand from creator Joel Hodgson’s Alternaversal.
“MST3K” had been jointly owned by Alternaversal and Shout! Studios since late 2015. Radial’s purchase includes all brand assets and intellectual property and follows nearly two decades of Shout!’s multichannel distribution of “MST3K” content. The amount of the final buyout was undisclosed.
Also: “Hodgson will remain involved with the property as brand ambassador and consultant.”
I hope they can keep it going and not screw it up…
New woke Star trek is such garbage people won’t even watch it for free. “Paramount only hit 1,300 live viewers during free YouTube premiere.”
Senate Democrats, lead by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, keep blocking a continuing resolution that would reopen large swathes of the federal government because they insist on continuing ObamaCare subsidies for illegal aliens. To this end, they’ve voted to keep the government shut down thirteen times. Republicans all voted to reopen the government, as well as “Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania” and “Independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats.” That makes the Republican bill to reopen the government the bipartisan bill.
In response to Democratic senators keeping the part of the government that supplies them with free food shut down, several Democrats on Tik-Tok, many visible obese, are threatening to loot grocery stores. Like the many businesses burned down during the #BlackLivesMatter/#Antifa riots of 2020, the businesses so looted would no doubt be stores in deep blue areas of deep blue cities, meaning the people they would overwhelmingly be harming would likely be other Democrats. (Or people too apathetic to vote. Or non-voting felons.)
Now, I am making the assumption that the people pledging to commit crimes to support their perceived absolute right to free stuff from American taxpayers are, in fact, Democrats. There may indeed be a few down-on-their-luck Republicans impacted by the lingering effects of the Biden Recession that have had to rely on government handouts to feed their children, but they don’t seem like the type threatening to break the law. I’m also assuming those would-be looters are not Libertarians, as none of them strike me as the sort to have Milton Friedman books in their apartments.
So unless Republicans give in on subsidizing illegal aliens, Democrats will continue to hurt Democratic voters by refusing to let the federal government subsidize food for Democrats.
Hell of a plan there, Chuck.
But it’s clear that the crazy Tik-Tokers will be getting free food one way or another. if they carry through on their threats, many of them might be getting fed via their three hots and a cot down at the local hoosegow…
The Schumer Shutdown continues, “No Kings” rallies turns out to be a shuffling parade of elderly white dorks, Ukraine continues destroying Russia’s oil infrastructure, that Dutch chip company seizure has bigger ramifications than I anticipated, Canada wants to steal people’s homes, an NBA gambling scandal erupts, and you have a chance to buy a painting from the Iron Lady Collection.
Senate Democrats killed a bill proposed by GOP Sens. Ron Johnson (WI) and Todd Young (IN) that would have paid government essential workers during the extended shutdown.
It failed 54-45. It needed 60 votes to advance.
Only Democrat Sens. John Fetterman (PA), Raphael Warnock (GA), and Jon Ossoff (GA) voted with the Republicans.
“Democrats have voted down the stopgap bill 12 times.”
“How Did California Spend Billions on Homelessness Only for It to Get Worse? Two New Criminal Cases Offer a Clue.” Honestly, the first sentence supplies its own answer even without the second.
How did California manage to spend $24 billion in taxpayer money to address homelessness over the past years, only for the problem to get substantially worse?
The state has not offered any explanation since that figure was revealed in a state audit released earlier this year. But the arrest of two California men on Thursday suggests that at least some of the money may have been stolen through fraud.
Cody Holmes, the former chief financial officer at a downtown Los Angeles-based developer of affordable housing, was arrested on a federal criminal complaint charging him with mail fraud. In a separate case, Steven Taylor is accused of defrauding lenders to aid his property-flipping business. He is charged with seven counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of money laundering.
The arrests come as part of a larger federal investigation into homelessness funding fraud in the Golden State.
“Accountability begins today,” said acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli when he announced the arrests on Thursday. He said the two cases are part of a pattern of the larger misappropriation of billions in state funds meant to combat homelessness.
An audit released by the state in April revealed that California has spent more than $24 billion over the past five years to address the state’s homelessness crisis. The acting U.S. attorney formed a Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force earlier this year to investigate where those tax dollars have gone.
“The two criminal cases announced is only the tip of the iceberg and we intend to aggressively pursue all leads and hold anyone who broke any federal laws criminally liable,” Essayli said.
Holmes, 31, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $25.9 million in state grant money for Shangri-La Industries, the developer of affordable housing for which he served as CFO. That money was intended to be used to purchase, construct, and operate homeless housing in Thousand Oaks under a state project called “Homekey.”
Holmes allegedly knowingly submitted inflated, fake bank records to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), to falsely prove the company had the capacity to fulfill homeless housing projects. However, authorities say the bank accounts that Holmes said contained these funds did not exist.
Holmes is now accused of using more than $2 million in state grant money to pay credit card bills that he was associated with, including purchases at luxury retailers.
HCD had previously paid millions of dollars to Shangri-La to buy, build, and operate housing for the homeless in Redlands and King City, among other California cities.
If convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
Meanwhile, Taylor, 44, is accused of using fake bank statements and false cash representations to obtain loans and lines of credit to operate his real estate business from August 2019 to July 2025.
The Brentwood man is also accused of lying to lenders about his intended use of various properties. He allegedly lied to the lender behind his purchase of a Cheviot Hills property, telling the lender he intended to renovate and use the property himself. However, he apparently had already contracted to sell the property, which he bought for $11.2 million thanks to a loan acquired through the use of fake bank statements. He was contracted to sell the property to a homeless housing developer who was purchasing the property with public funds from the city of Los Angeles and the state of California for $27.3 million in a double-escrow transaction hidden from the victim lender and others.
If convicted, Taylor would face up to 30 years in federal prison for each bank fraud count, up to ten years in federal prison for the money laundering count, and a two-year prison sentence for the aggravated identity theft count.
I’m sure this is only the tip of the Homeless Industrial Complex iceberg…
Speaking of homeless industrial complex fraud: “FBI raids homes of Charlotte activist Cedric Dean in health care fraud investigation.”
The FBI raided the home of Cedric Dean, a well-known community activist in Charlotte’s Palisades neighborhood, on Thursday.
The search is part of a federal investigation into an alleged multi-million dollar health care fraud scheme, according to federal court documents released to Queen City News.
A spokesperson for the FBI confirmed on Thursday that agents were “engaged in court-authorized investigative activity,” but did not offer further details.
Court documents obtained by QCN reveal that Dean and his company, Cedric Dean Holdings, are accused of fraudulently billing Medicaid for mental health services that were never provided. Investigators said Dean targeted vulnerable people, including those experiencing homelessness, in exchange for their Medicaid information, offering food or temporary shelter in return.
Dean allegedly submitted inflated or false claims to Medicaid, sometimes using fake diagnoses, and paid staff and recruiters through services like CashApp. Authorities said his company billed roughly $1 million per month and operated without enough staff to actually provide care.
“They’ve lost culture… Calling someone a Democrat is an insult,” Travis noted, adding “Calling someone a Kamala voter is an insult. This is white, black, Asian, Hispanic: young men across America are over the BS that they saw at this No Kings rally.”
“Look at the dance. These are huge dorks. They have no power. They are losers. No one wants to hang out with them,” Travis continued, pointing to the event as emblematic of the party’s disconnect.
“They’re old, 1960s protesters who now are on the side that they used to protest against. They don’t realize that the world has shifted around them and they are awkward lunatics,” he further emphasized.
No Kings? They don’t mean it, as they rebranded as “No Tyrants” in countries with monarchies.
“Ukraine hit Russia’s Novokuybyshevsk refinery in Samara, one of Rosneft’s key plants, processing 8.8M tons of crude annually, about 3% of Russia’s total refining capacity,” some 1,000km from Ukraine.
Hamas is carrying out the terms of the ceasefire every bit as well as you would expect. “After Attack on Troops, Israel Hits Hamas Terror Targets in Gaza BBC. Hamas carried out ‘multiple attacks against Israeli forces beyond the yellow line.'”
Israel struck terrorist targets in southern Gaza after Hamas terrorists attacked its troops located inside the agreed ceasefire line, violating the U.S.-brokered agreement. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out airstrikes in the Rafah area on Sunday morning in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas,” the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS reported.
In response to Hamas’s action, the Israeli military targeted terror tunnels used in the sneak attacks. “Earlier, an IED or anti-tank explosion struck near an IDF engineering vehicle in the same area,” the broadcaster added. “Reports from Gaza indicate the strikes targeted Hamas positions shortly after the terror group fired an anti-tank missile at IDF forces.”
Trump’s genius wasn’t getting an agreement that would bring lasting peace for all time, it was getting the remaining living hostages out before Hamas inevitably violated the ceasefire.
“Palestinian illegal alien arrested by FBI for participating in October 7th terror attack.” “The complaint described the man, identified in court documents as Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi, as an operative for a paramilitary group in Gaza that has fought alongside Hamas.” Naturally, the media refers to him as “Louisiana Man.”
“Haitians who replaced American workers in tiny Pennsylvania town will be unemployed as factory shuts down.” “Many of these migrants were employed by a meatpacking plant known as Fourth Street Barbecue, also operating under the name Fourth Street Foods. They displaced native-born workers, drained local resources, and wired their paychecks overseas to third-world countries.”
One day after German tabloid newspaper Bild reported that Volkswagen had suspended production of the Golf at its Wolfsburg factory due to a worsening semiconductor shortage caused by a supply stoppage of Nexperia chips, the Dutch chipmaker, recently seized by the Netherlands government, warned Japanese automakers on Thursday that it may no longer be able to guarantee chip supply. The chip crisis spreading from Europe to Japan has set off alarm bells across the industry.
Bloomberg reports that the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association (JAMA) has confirmed that its members, Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, have received warnings from Nexperia about chip supply woes and are working with customers to mitigate disruptions.
JAMA cautioned that chip shortages could have a “serious impact” on global auto production and urged governments to reach a “prompt and practical solution.”
“The chips manufactured by the affected manufacturers are important parts used in electronic control units, etc., and we recognize that this incident will have a serious impact on the global production of our member companies,” JAMA wrote in a statement, adding, “We hope that the countries involved will come to a prompt and practical solution.”
There’s something weird going on here. Any global manufacturing giant worth it’s salt should have second-source contingency plans for such lowly parts as semiconductor discretes. Even in Europe, there are other discrete manufacturers like Infineion and STMicroelctronics. Somebody (or a whole lot of somebodies) dropped the ball here.
“In just 7 minutes, thieves allegedly mounted a ladder, stole priceless jewels from the Louvre and fled on motor scooters.” No painstaking disarming of the alarm system? No sophisticated computer intrusion? No hanging from a cable to avoid triggering the floor alarm? Just smashing windows and cases with brute force? The ghosts of a century’s worth of French screenplay writers sigh in disappointment…
Welcome to Richmond, British Columbia, a suburb of Metro Vancouver.
This is a letter the city sent to residents to notify them that their home might belong to the natives who once camped there 200 years ago.
Please take note that the recent BC Supreme Court decision of Cowichan Tribes v Canada, 2025 BCSC 1490 made some very important decisions which could negatively affect the title to your property. A briefing paper prepared by City of Richmond staff is attached for your reference.
If you look at the draft map attached to the briefing, your property is located within the Claim Area outlined in green. For those whose property is in the area outlined in black, the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership – this was mandated without any prior notice to the landowners. The entire area outlined in green is claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.
Snip.
A liberal female judge issued an 863-page ruling ordering that private properties, some of which have been in families for generations, must return to the hands of a nomadic tribe that once loosely lived on the land hundreds of years ago, long before anyone who is currently alive was ever born.
This matter was so important to the judge and other liberal allies that it was the “longest trial in Canada’s history.” It is also seen as setting a precedent for confiscating property across the nation.
Now you know why the radical left keeps pushing those bullshit “land acknowledgements.”
A tenured professor at the University of Texas at Austin says he was dismissed from his senior administrative post due to “ideological differences,” marking the latest shake-up in Texas’ statewide effort to reform higher education and curb campus DEI influence.
Last week, Art Markman posted that UT leadership had dismissed him in late September as academic affairs senior vice provost.
Climate activist David Bookbinder admits its a shakedown. “Essentially, the tort liability is an indirect carbon tax. You sue an oil company, an oil company is liable, the oil company then passes that liability on to the people who are buying its products.”
NBA gambling scandal: “ESPN is reporting the arrest of Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups. Also arrested: Terry Rozier, guard for the Miami Heat.”
Billups, an NBA Hall of Famer, has been charged with partaking in an alleged illegal poker ring tied to the Bonanno, Genovese and Colombo crime families, sources told The Post.
A total of 31 people across the country are charged with running rigged games, which took place in Manhattan, the Hamptons and Las Vegas, sources said.
The players involved were being paid by mobsters to play in card games fixed with technology and card shuffling machines to give the house the advantage, sources familiar with the case said.
The athletes were told to take a dive when they had to and win when they were told. It didn’t appear as if they were attempting to pay off any debts, sources said.
Rozier is being charged with point-shaving.
Director Blue has a lot more details about the mob guys running the games, and the sophisticated technologies used, like special contact lenses to read marked cards, cryptocurrency money laundering and x-ray tables.
The Critical Drinker walks through every Disney Star Wars film, how much they cost, and how much they made or lost. Since they received substantial tax credits for filming in the UK, they evidently had to submit real numbers rather than the usual Hollywood Accounting bullshit. The Force Awakens evidently cost $638.9 million to make, which would probably rank it as the most expensive film of all time.
The Biden economy is still sucking, the arsonist who helped set LA ablaze was (of course!) an illegal alien, a Tik-Tok triptych, Dan Patrick announces a staggering warchest, WaPo walloped, Stacey Abrams is busted, and Americans are told “no thanks” by Chinese RedNote users.
The bad news for American workers doesn’t end there. “1 in 5 postings on Greenhouse are ‘ghost jobs.'”
There were many reasons why they did it. Some did it for the same reason Biden’s administration did: To make their company look like it was doing better than it was. Some post them just in case there is a unicorn out there with magical qualifications.
But the most frustrating reason was the final one:
Some hiring managers even admitted they post fake jobs to keep their own employees on their toes, saying they want workers to feel ‘replaceable’ so they will work harder.
“LA County Arson Suspect is Illegal Immigrant Repeat Offender Protected By California’s Sanctuary State Policies.” Because of course he is. “The suspect, Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, is a Mexican national who has already been convicted of multiple crimes, but because California is a sanctuary state, he is unlikely to be deported, the New York Post reported.”
Just days after reports that she’d planned to can her fire chief, Kristin Crowley, after she publicly criticized the level of funding she’d received from the city, Bass is facing intense criticism yet again from a memo up on a city website, which shows that just months ago, the chief practically begged city hall to stop its budget-cutting spree on fire response.
The memo, which was dated Nov. 18, was written to the fire commissioners, according to the Washington Free Beacon. That’s a five-person board appointed by Bass.
In Crowley’s memo, she urged the commissioners to let Bass and the city council know how dire the situation was.
“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s,” Crowley wrote.
A federal judge in Texas has found that American Airlines violated both federal law and their fiduciary duty to their employees by using the company’s 401(k) plan to push ESG. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Texas Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick is loaded for bear. “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick posted ‘over $33.5 million’ cash-on-hand for his re-election campaign in 2026.”
Ron DeSantis continues to drive the enemy before him and hear the lamentations of their women. “United Teachers of Dade, Florida’s largest teachers union, failed to meet the requirements of a new state law that requires at least 60% of union members pay dues.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Keir Starmer’s Labour government has been trying to give away the Chagos Islands, despite them being the home to vital U.S. military base Diego Garcia. Fortunately, someone has slammed the breaks on the deal until Trump is in office.
Big drone attack from Ukraine against Russia, with reportedly over 200 drones used.
“WaPo’s Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, who portrays Republicans as groomers and predators, arrested for possession of child porn. Washington Post cartoonist Darrin Bell arrested for possession of child pornography.”
But it’s not all bad news for Bezos! TDS sufferer Jennifer Rubin quit.
Remember Stacey Abrams, the black female Georgian Beto? The mediocrity whose fawning media profiles never turned into actual election victories? Well, “Stacey Abrams Group Hit with Largest Fine in Georgia History for Violating Campaign Finance Law.”
A Democratic advocacy group founded by former Representative Stacey Abrams and once led by Senator Raphael Warnock were fined $300,000 on Wednesday for breaking Georgia’s campaign finance law.
Georgia’s ethics commission found that the New Georgia Project and its affiliated action fund raised $4.2 million and spent $3.2 million to support Abrams during the 2018 election cycle when she ran for governor. The groups failed to disclose those partisan contributions in violation of state campaign finance law. Abrams ultimately lost to Republican Brian Kemp, who defeated her again in 2022.
The two entities agreed to pay a $300,000 penalty, the largest fine in the commission’s 38-year history, in two $150,000 installments for 16 instances of illegal activity. The punishment is aimed at the groups, not Abrams and Warnock directly.
The New Georgia Project failed to register as an independent campaign committee and failed to file campaign finance reports of contributions and spending in 2018, showing their support for Abrams and other Democratic candidates.
In 2019, the groups committed the same offense without disclosing $646,000 in contributions and $174,000 in spending to support a voter referendum for Gwinnett County’s citizens to join the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority system. Despite the nonprofit’s efforts, voters rejected the referendum.
Just like Beto…
You didn’t expect Ken Paxton to let Biden leave office without one last lawsuit. “Texas Sues Biden Administration Over ‘Unlawful’ Methane Tax. Along with 22 other states, Texas is seeking to bar the final rule from taking effect on January 17.”
Turns out Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin didn’t bother to tell the chain of command that he was having major surgery. Or that he was hopped up on goofballs afterwards…
Not the Bee: “Asked what he’ll talk about at Mar-a-Lago, John Fetterman says, “I demand that I need to be made Pope of Greenland.” Fetterman seems to be the rare Democrat with a sense of humor…
In addition to getting over a cold, I spent most of the non-work day trying to assemble a pressure washer so I could attach a water-jetting attachment so I can clean out a blocked exterior line so I can run my dishwasher without it overflowing my sink.
The result of all this labor is that I still need to call a plumber. So enjoy yet another abbreviated LinkSwarm.
Hmmmmmm! “Hunter Biden Business Partner Flips, Now ‘Cooperating’ With GOP Investigators.”
Eric Schwerin, a close business associate of Hunter Biden who also dealt with Joe Biden’s business and tax affairs, is now working with House GOP investigators looking into Biden family dealings – particularly in Ukraine and China, where the family collected millions of dollars, Just the News reports.
Eric Schwerin, a close business associate of Hunter Biden who also dealt with Joe Biden’s business and tax affairs, is now working with House GOP investigators looking into Biden family dealings – particularly in Ukraine and China, where the family collected millions of dollars, Just the News reports.
“He is cooperating with us,” House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) told the outlet.
“His attorneys and my counsel are communicating on a regular basis. Now, I feel confident that he’s going to work with us, and provide us with the information that we have requested,” Comer continued. “I think that Schwerwin is going to be a very valuable witness for us in this investigation.”
Of note, Schwerin, the former president of Hunter Biden’s now-dissolved investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners, visited the White House at least 19 times from 2009 to 2015, according to White House visitor log records reviewed by The Epoch Times and first reported by the New York Post.
Patrick L. Wojahn, the Democratic mayor of College Park, MD, resigns over child porn charges. Name that party: His political affiliation only shows up in the 19th paragraph of the piece. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Illnesses to Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein and John Fetterman mean that Democrats have temporarily lost their senate majority. That will teach you to rely to Octagenerians and visibly impaired stroke victims to carry your water. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta submits $5.5 billion bid for NFL’s Commanders.” He should move them to Austin and change the name back to the Redskins, just to spite them.
Did MacKay get Tulipmania wrong? It turns out he was also an enthusiast for the far more destructive “Railway Bubbles” that struck England in the 19th century.
