Trump’s first hundred days, a Ukraine mineral deal at last, Democrats choose rapists over women (again), employment numbers are up (unexpectedly!), Josh Hawley names and shames PELOSI, Reform UK wins big, Spain blacks out (and not from Sangria), a sneaky local Williamson County election tomorrow, and the return of the Worst Gun of All Time.
After President Trump’s first 100 days, what stands out to me is his straightforward trademark phrase — “promises made, promises kept.”
He was elected on November 5 to transform the country in a completely different direction from the failed presidency of Joe Biden.
And that is precisely what Mr. Trump has done.
He is a disruptor. He is a change agent. He is fighting the entrenched elites and their institutions. He’s not afraid to use shock and awe. He is also a master dealmaker. He is also a man chockful of common sense.
None of this is going to be easy, nor will it come without glitches. But the political reality of his first 100 days is that Mr. Trump has kept his word to the American people.
So, 142 executive orders later, Mr. Trump has secured the border, restored safety, and is making great progress on the deportation of criminal illegal aliens.
For every one new regulation, Mr. Trump is abolishing ten others.
He is cutting taxes across the board to launch a blue-collar boom, while reducing prices with the production of more goods.
He has reopened the energy spigots, and will profitably deploy America’s abundant resources.
He is eliminating federal waste, fraud, and abuse. He is shrinking the size of the federal government.
And he has launched a reciprocal fair-trade initiative.
So, pulling all of this together, in his first 100 days Mr. Trump has fundamentally restored hope for faster growth and greater affordability.
And, as tough as it may be, he is working to restore peace in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran.
Culturally, he has stopped the Democratic woke march to DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion.
He has fought hard for religious freedom, an end to government censorship, and has stopped the weaponization of justice.
Mr. Trump has gone after the elite universities for their failure to stop antisemitism.
And, indeed, for all of Mr. Trump’s pro-growth economic initiatives, and his ‘peace through strength’ foreign policy, his determination to restore a more traditional, cultural, and spiritual country is one of his greatest accomplishments in the first 100 days.
#Winning.
Finally: “U.S., Ukraine Sign Minerals Deal in Major Breakthrough for Peace Talks.”
U.S. and Ukrainian officials have signed a long-anticipated deal that gives the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in exchange for a promised security guarantee to protect Kyiv from future Russian aggression, signaling President Donald Trump’s commitment to ending the war.
The deal was signed Wednesday afternoon on Trump’s 100th day in office by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, as the latter visited Washington, D.C., to finalize the details. The Treasury Department confirmed the signed deal, called the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.
“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump Administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term. President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine,” Bessent said in a statement. “And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”
The minerals deal grants the U.S. access to Ukraine’s natural resources, including aluminum, graphite, oil, and natural gas, according to Bloomberg. It also lays out details about the economic partnership between the U.S. and Ukraine.
With that deal finally done, Trump finally has the excuse he needs to keep supporting Ukraine, especially if Russia refuses Trump’s demands to come to the negotiating table.
More proof that the Democrat Party is objectively pro-rape: ‘California Dems Vote To Keep Male Sex Offenders In Female Prisons.”
Democrats on the California Senate Public Safety Committee shot down a bill on Tuesday that would have kept male sex criminals out of female prisons.
The committee, which includes far-Left Senator Scott Wiener, voted down a proposal from Republican Senator Shannon Grove to protect women from males who are registered sex offenders from being able to be housed in women’s prisons. The bill also would have given women privacy in sleeping arrangements and showers, meaning that they would be protected from males who have taken advantage of California’s lax laws that allow men to be placed in women’s prisons.
“Today I am here on behalf of incarcerated women in California prisons who are dealing with the unintended consequences of allowing transgender inmates to be housed in women’s correction facilities,” Grove said at the committee hearing. “Everyone agrees that we need to keep inmates safe and provide additional protections.”
She noted that she had received a letter from a female inmate discussing how males were being housed in her prison. The letter included a condom that had been distributed by prison staff.
“Why is the state of California paying for condoms in women’s prisons?” Grove asked the committee.
The only lawmaker to support the bill was Senator Kelly Seyarto, the lone Republican on the committee.
Grove’s bill is seeking to address problems created by SB 132, a bill sponsored by Wiener that said that inmates should be housed according to their “gender identity.” Her legislation would “establish a secure facility at each women’s prison to house transgender women, in order to protect the security needs of biological women at birth in sleeping and other intimate areas” and prohibit male sex offenders from being eligible to be assigned to female prisons.
“SB 132 created a preference for transgender individuals. If you are a woman serving in the women’s prison and a transgender self-identified check-the-box person comes in and goes, ‘I want to house with you,’ the woman in that cell has no recourse. They can’t say no because that’s considered discriminatory,” Grove told The Daily Wire on Monday.
Grove said that she was told before the hearing that the committee planned to kill the bill. She said that the California Democrat supermajority had a “preference for predators versus victims.”
Democrats are at war with biology, reality, and basic human decency.
Along the same lines, Maine Democrats have censured state Republican Rep. Laurel Libby for standing against men in women’s athletics, including stripping her right to vote on bills. Boy, Democrats sure seem unclear on this whole “democracy” thing…
“Trump signs order ending taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS.” Good. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Up until yesterday, Matthew Bruderman was the chairman of Nassau University Medical Center. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Bruderman announced he was cooperating with the FBI and Department of Justice in an investigation. Specifically, Mr. Bruderman claims that New York state and Long Island have stolen at least $1 billion from the organization.
Bruderman said he believes the officials’ ultimate goal was to financially strangle the public hospital, paving the way for state and local leaders to shut it down, take over the land currently owned by the public-benefit corporation that runs it and have it redeveloped for profit.
Wednesday night, Mr. Bruderman’s house was burglarized. However, the only thing allegedly taken was…documents tied to the investigation.
Bruderman wasn’t home at the time of the robbery and only found out after police called to inform him they had recovered a binder with his name on it in a car driven by an unidentified couple, he said.
“I was confused because that was the binder I had on my desk when I left,” he said.
Bruderman said he later found his backdoor pried wide open.
The binder, he said, contained “sensitive” materials related to the ongoing federal investigation, including documents and records tied to the financial misconduct he claims to have uncovered while reviewing hospital finances and state reimbursements.
Snip.
At the heart of the alleged scheme is a little-known federal program called the Disproportionate Share Hospital Fund — meant to help keep afloat struggling hospitals such as NUMC, which treat large numbers of low-income patients on Medicaid and Medicare.
Under the program, the federal government agrees to give hospitals tens of millions of dollars in funding as long as their state matches the investment.
According to [Bruderman’s] review of internal financial records, previous hospital leadership allegedly “borrowed” what was supposed to be the state’s matching share from an offshore account tied to a Cayman Islands trust, originally set up to cover the medical center’s legal bills.
That money would be temporarily transferred into the hospital’s general fund just long enough to fool the feds into thinking New York had paid its share — unlocking the federal portion of the funding, he claimed.
But once the federal funds cleared, the state’s contribution would allegedly be moved right back offshore.
That would mean those matching funds vanished into the shadows in a conspiracy that could’ve included top officials.
Seems plausible to me. Oh, also: “Mr. Bruderman was fired on Thursday.”
Blue state governance in action: “Washington state now gives $120,000 ‘forgivable loans’ for new homebuyers. But only if they’re not white.”
As part of the covenant homeownership program, the department shall contract with the commission to design, develop, implement and evaluate one or more special purpose credit programs to reduce racial disparities in ownership in the state by providing down payment and closing cost assistance… The contract must authorize the commission to use up to one percent of the contract to provide targeted education, homeownership counseling, and outreach about special purpose credit programs created under this section to black, indigenous, and people of color and other historically marginalized communities in Washington state.
Forgivable means they’re giving your tax dollars to other people to buy a home based on their skin color. I think this violates all sorts of civil rights and equal protection causes, and Pam Bondi’s DOJ should sue.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has reintroduced the “Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments” (PELOSI) Act that would prohibit members of Congress and their families from trading stocks while in office.
The name of the act is a direct nod in the direction of 20 term Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) whose net worth has soared from $160,000 when she was first elected in 1987 to more than $140 million in 2024.
A dozen of the White House’s (WH) newly-published list of 100 of “the worst of the worst criminal illegal immigrants” arrested since President Donald Trump took office in January were apprehended by Texas branches of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In a news release titled “In the First 100 Days, the Trump Administration Has Taken Killers Rapists Off Our Streets,” images of the 100 detainees were listed online in chronological order by the date of their arrests — as well as displayed on the White House lawn — prior to a press conference held by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Border Czar Tom Homan.
Six of the illegal immigrants included in the “worst of the worst” list were arrested by Houston ICE authorities, five by Dallas ICE, and one by Austin ICE.
One of the arrests made by Houston ICE was of a 70-year-old Indian national, Raju Varughese Vayechaparampil, convicted of “aggravated sexual assault of a child” in Harris County. With a similar conviction also in Harris County for “indecency with child sexual contact,” Che Xol Norberto was arrested on March 18. Osvaldo Diaz, a Cuban national, was arrested by the same ICE branch for convictions of “Trespassing and Sexual Assault Child/Battery Child” while in Florida.
Another arrest made by ICE Houston was a 64-year-old citizen of Honduras, Eduardo Garcia-Cortez, convicted of murder in California.
“God bless the men and women of ICE who strap a gun to their hip every day … To not only secure our border and protect our national security but … they’re removing public safety threats and national security threats every day,” Homan said during the presser.
“While you’re all sleeping, at two or three in the morning, there are men and women out there, enforcing the law, making this country safe again. And we’re going to keep doing that, full speed ahead,” he addressed the WH press pool.
ICE Austin’s arrest was of Humberto Ruiz-Zapata, who has convictions of murder and Driving While Intoxicated. He is a citizen of Mexico, with a prior “final removal date” of May 12, 2017.
ICE Dallas arrested Tay Myint, a citizen of Burma, on March 3. Myint was sentenced to prison for 12 years due to “aggravated sexual assault of a child” in the City of Cactus.
ICE Denver officers arrested Joel Matos-Nieto, 23, a criminal alien from Venezuela and member of the international gang Tren de Aragua with a final order of removal April 23. Matos has convictions for motor vehicle theft, obstructing a police officer and criminal mischief. pic.twitter.com/ZcaavP8A72
As Michael Shellenberger writes at PUBLIC, this wasn’t just a Spanish blackout. It shook the entire European grid.
…none of this should have been a surprise. The underlying physics had been understood for years, and the specific vulnerabilities had been spelled out repeatedly in technical warnings that policymakers ignored.
…
As countries replaced heavy, spinning plants with lightweight, inverter-based generation, the grid became faster, lighter, and far more sensitive to disruptions. That basic physical reality was spelled out in public warnings as far back as 2017.
…
Although political leaders promised that renewable energy would provide stable, affordable power, in practice, Spain grew more reliant on the remaining nuclear and natural gas plants to sustain inertia — even as the government pushes them to close.
…
Despite all these warnings, political and regulatory energy in Europe remained focused on accelerating renewable deployment, not upgrading the grid’s basic stability. In Spain, solar generation continued to climb rapidly through 2023 and early 2024.
Coal plants closed. Nuclear units retired.
On many spring days by 2025, Spain’s midday solar generation exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to frequent negative electricity prices.
The system was being pushed to the limit.
And today, at 12:35 pm, it broke.
…
Spain’s blackout wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a political and strategic failure.
…
Unless Spain rapidly invests in synthetic inertia, maintains and expands its nuclear fleet, or adds some other new form of heavy rotating generation, the risk of future blackouts will only grow worse.
Nigel Farage’s Reform Party racked up big gains in UK local elections.
It has won over 630 council seats from around 1,500 declared so far, with results from a further 100 or so still to come in.
Reform has seized control of six authorities from the Conservatives after elections on Thursday, including Tory heartlands such as Kent and Staffordshire.
The party has also won control of Doncaster council from Labour, and taken control in Durham, where Labour was the largest party.
At least the UK isn’t trying to ban a suddenly popular, outsider party. Unlike Germany. ” Germany’s Intel Agency Designates AfD Party as ‘Extremist,’ Paves Way for Possible Ban. AfD officials made “xenophobic, anti-minority, Islamophobic and anti-Muslim statements,” spy agency cites as reason for the ‘extremist’ designation.” Eveidently the powers that be in Germany feel that notcing the baleful effects of unlimited, unassimilated Muslim immigration is “extremism.”
Germany has designated the country’s leading opposition party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), as ‘extremist,’ paving the way for a possible ban. The decision to classify the party was taken by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency Verfassungschutz, which operates under the country’s Interior Ministry.
“Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has designated the Alternative for Germany, the country’s second-largest political party, as a right-wing extremist group, a controversial step that could lead to the organisation being banned altogether,” the Belgian news website Euroactiv reported.
Good thing Germany banning political parties has never had any negative effects in the past…
Palmdale to Gilroy is about 300 miles. In 20 years. Or about 15 miles of track a year. Or, counting 260 work days a year, that’s an astonishing .0587 miles of track a day, or a whopping 300 feet a day. By the way, the 1,911 mile transcontinental railroad was built in six years, largely by hand. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
This was unexpected: “Donald Trump Endorses Speaker Dustin Burrows, All Pro-School Choice Texas House Republicans
The endorsement was relayed by Abbott in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday.”
President Donald Trump has endorsed Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) and every House Republican who voted for education savings account legislation earlier this month, according to Gov. Greg Abbott.
Abbott relayed the news to a meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday morning before the chamber gaveled in for the day’s business, The Texan reported.
The endorsement goes to the 86 House Republicans who voted for Senate Bill (SB) 2 on April 16. It comes for the 2026 midterms, and for Burrows himself, it’s also an endorsement for re-election as speaker. Trump told the caucus the morning of April 16 in a closed-door meeting that he would endorse them if they voted for SB 2. All but two Republicans, former Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont) and state Rep. Gary VanDeaver (R-New Boston), voted for it.
Passing school choice was indeed an accomplishment, but Burrows is still the latest in the Straus-Bonnin-Phelan cabal who have kept Democrats in a power-sharing agreement and thwarted conservative priorities for over a decade. burrows himself has presided over a House that has slow-walked conservative bills long after they sailed through the senate. This may be case of President Trump seeing things at a very high level and not being aware of the details. And speaking of Republican dissatisfaction with the Burrows Speakership…
With just over a month remaining in the 2025 legislative session, a group of conservative Texas House members gathered for a press conference to issue a stark warning to their leadership: time is almost up to deliver on Republican priorities.
“Today is day 107 of our 140-day legislative session,” said State Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R–Arlington). “In 12 days, every House bill that is going to pass must be reported by its committee. The clock is ticking, and our Republican voters are looking for the Republican majority they elected to the Texas House to deliver.”
Immigration and Border Security
State Rep. Mike Olcott (R–Aledo) said border security remains the number one priority for both the Texas GOP and voters across the state. He outlined four key policy targets: mandatory use of E-Verify, ending in-state tuition for illegal aliens, requiring local law enforcement cooperation with ICE, and addressing Colony Ridge.
On E-Verify, Olcott noted that “Senate Bill 324 was approved on second reading just yesterday, and we anticipate it will pass over to the House this week.” But in the House, he warned, progress has been sluggish.
“So far in the Texas House, the only legislation that’s been heard in committee on E-Verify is House Bill 323 … which only requires E-Verify for new local government employees, which is noble, but does not come close to turning off the employment magnet driving illegal immigration into this state.”
Snip.
Banning Social Transitioning of Minors
State Rep. Steve Toth (R–Conroe) focused on protecting children from social transitioning in schools. He said that while Texas banned gender mutilation surgeries in the last session, the House still hasn’t acted on legislation to prevent social transitioning.
“The good news is that we now have a great bill, House Bill 2258, to protect these kids,” Toth said. “Even better news is, it’s on its way to the governor’s desk … Bad news is, it’s not the governor of Texas. It’s the governor of Arkansas.”
Despite support from some members in the State Affairs Committee, the bill remains stuck.
“Chairman King won’t give it a hearing,” Toth said. “Texans will not forgive our massive Republican majority if we fail to protect children from groomers.”
Williamson County has local elections tomorrow. I’m not in a locale that’s having an election, but Michelle Evans of the Wilco GOP wrote to say they’re endorsing Mike Snyder for Hutto Mayor, Shannon Quicksall for Taylor City Council District 4, Cyndi Hauser for Liberty Hill ISD Trustee Place 7 and Ben Butler for Georgetown City Council District 3.
To hit or not to hit Iran, that is the question, illegal alien friendly judges land themselves in hot water, some party switch shenanigans in Florida, the Texas Senate passes some bills (good and bad), and updates on the proceedings against several disgraced politicos. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Also, Texas residents should remember that the Sales tax Holiday starts tomorrow.
Tenacity is the most important virtue of national leaders at war, which allows them to press on with no assurance of victory, fending off tremendous political pressures to fold. Winston Churchill displayed this quality in 1940. In June of that year, Germany appeared unstoppable. Paris and the entirety of Western Europe had fallen. The Luftwaffe was grinding down the grossly outnumbered British pilots, and German invasion barges were being assembled in Belgian ports. Even then, with Britain desperate for U.S. support, the American national debate on interventionism, prompted by the outbreak of war in September 1939, continued to break decisively in favor of the isolationists.
Exploring an accommodation with Germany appeared as the eminently reasonable and prudent course of action because of Herr Hitler’s generous offer to leave Britain and its vast empire intact. When British parliamentarians pressed Churchill to explain his plan, he confessed to his intimates that he had no plan at all. He was determined to just keep buggering on.
Then the situation became bleaker still for the British and for Churchill personally. In June 1941, the German army smashed its way into Russia, advancing rapidly toward what looked like an imminent victory. Although the Wehrmacht’s swift conquests promised to wholly remedy Germany’s only weakness—its lack of petroleum—the isolationists in the U.S. Congress remained dominant. Meanwhile, at home, London was abuzz with talk of Churchill’s heavy drinking, his personal dependence on gifts from his Jewish friends to pay for his extravagant tastes and, above all, his utter lack of strategy—he had failed to offer any path at all that could conceivably lead to victory.
Things looked grim all around. In North Africa, the brilliant German tactician Erwin Rommel was outmaneuvering British forces with ease. Much worse were the first reports of Germany’s astonishing technological progress: the world’s first jet fighter that could easily outfly every single British and American fighter; the world’s first air-to-surface missile (Fritz X) that, in September 1943, would sink the Italian battleship Roma (to prevent it from surrendering to the Allies); and the Tiger tank that could crush British armor.
Nevertheless, the isolationists in Congress refused to fund even a prosaic piston-engine fighter project—the P-51 Mustang, the war’s best Allied fighter—which was developed with fast-dwindling British funds.
Churchill’s answer? Just keep buggering on.
Snip.
Whereas Churchill’s problem was an isolationist Congress that constrained a generally sympathetic president, Netanyahu enjoyed ample support on the Hill but faced an American administration determined to cut Israel down to size and to remove him from power.
As Israel fought a major, multifront war in October 2023, key U.S. officials encouraged domestic uproar against Netanyahu and worked to constrain him and even collapse his government.
That was not all the president’s doing, but Joe Biden’s administration was stacked with Barack Obama’s leftovers, who ran the gamut of pathological Israel haters, from Samantha Power to Robert Malley—the red-diaper baby of Stalinist Jewish parents in Paris whom I met in my youth when they were working for Algeria’s National Liberation Front, which was not merely fanatically anti-Israel but also declaredly anti-Jewish, much like Yemen’s Houthis today. With the CIA mostly very hostile (as it has been since it was established in 1947, as declassified documents fully reveal), only the Pentagon harbored some friends of Israel—although that hardly stopped the administration from using every trick in the book to delay mid-war weapons supplies to Israel.
Netanyahu faced a concerted campaign, directed from Washington, that brought together Israeli nonprofits and Netanyahu’s political opponents. Almost from the get-go, Netanyahu had to overcome calls and protests by well-educated—and some even well-meaning—Israelis and American Jews, as well as all the usual suspects in European capitals and almost every other world government incessantly demanding a cease-fire, not as a pause, but as an end to the war.
Worse still, several of Israel’s retired and barely retired generals threw their weight behind the cease-fire push. Some did so with the authority of true heroes, such as Yair Golan, the head of the unsubtly named The Democrats (a merger of the left-wing Labor and Meretz Parties) and former IDF deputy chief of staff no less. Golan jumped into his small car on Oct. 7 to successfully rescue people with his handgun, as did the former head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate Israel Ziv, now a very successful security contractor overseas after distinguished service, who became the guru of an entire cabal of retired generals, including some who served in Netanyahu’s government until they left it to oppose him. Then, inevitably, there were tawdry time-servers who somehow became generals without doing much other than talking, like Amos Gilead, who’s well known and much-favored in U.S. officialdom because of his hostility to Netanyahu.
All those former generals demanded the same thing, albeit at different times: to stop the war with no way of recovering the Israeli hostages and no way of forcing Hamas to accept supervised disarmament, therefore allowing it to use a cease-fire to reconstitute.
Furthermore, these generals offered no solution whatever to the Hezbollah dilemma in the north. The day after the Oct. 7 attack, Hezbollah started launching rockets against Israel. If Israel did not attack, Hezbollah forces, then assuredly the most powerful non-state army in the world, was certainly capable of burning every Jewish town and village north of Haifa with countless rockets (the number 110,000 that was widely circulated turned out to be simply invented) while targeting power stations, Ben Gurion Airport, port facilities, every chemical plant and refinery, and every air base with thousands of guided missiles. If Israel were to attack, those massive barrages would immediately begin.
As Netanyahu pondered this dilemma, he had to deal not only with his security establishment but also with unremitting pressure from Washington. A mere few days after Oct. 7, the Biden administration intervened and made clear its opposition to an Israeli preemptive strike against Hezbollah—a position it would maintain over the next year. In fact, when Israel finally eliminated Hassan Nasrallah in a strike on his bunker on Sept. 27, 2024, Biden’s reaction was an irate “Bibi, what the fuck?”
The Biden administration displayed a similar hands-off attitude toward Iran’s proxy in Yemen, allowing Tehran to pile more pressure on Israel. The Houthis joined the fight with their skirts, sandals, and Iranian supplied anti-ship missiles and drones that not only deprived Israel of its secondary Red Sea sea port access but also targeted commercial vessels, blocking navigation in the area and forcing shipping companies to find longer, more expensive routes, thereby augmenting U.S. and international pressure on Israel to end the war. Washington allowed Iran to stop maritime traffic in the Red Sea and Suez Canal without any retaliation against Tehran and its own maritime traffic, while Western disarray was compounded by the spectacle of very expensive European navies doing nothing much even as their Mediterranean ports lost all their Asian traffic.
This shameful passivity reinforced the Israeli conviction that France, Italy, and Spain, unable and unwilling to defend even their own direct material interests, would only yield to Muslim demographic and political pressure in other respects as well. Only the British joined the United States in eventually striking the Houthis, though mostly symbolically and nowhere near the sustained and targeted campaign required to destroy Houthi capabilities.
Between American permissiveness toward Iran’s multipronged campaign and Washington’s support for Netanyahu’s domestic opposition, calls for a Gaza cease-fire intensified and became the default position across the political landscape, from Israel’s left and even moderate center to most European governments, in addition to the Biden administration.
It is against this backdrop that Netanyahu’s pure resolve must be understood. With this remarkable array of forces, external and internal, bearing down on him, his tenacity was the only thing that mattered.
Read the whole thing.
The Houthis in Yemen are in the find out phase, as U.S. forces just blew up a vital oil port.
Fresh US airstrikes on Yemen Thursday marked the single-deadliest known attack under President Donald Trump’s new campaign targeting the Houthi rebels. The Pentagon has been intensely bombing Yemen since March 15, when the Gaza truce collapsed.
A Houthi spokesman announced Friday that the attacks killed 38 people and wounded 102 others. The death toll was hours later updated to at least 74 killed. The operation mainly targeted and destroyed the Ras Isa oil port, which sent massive fireballs shooting into the night sky.
The final pillar of the plan, calling to “confront long-term contributors to domestic terrorism,” is laden with potentially controversial social proposals.
This section identifies “ghost guns”—unregistered weapons without a serial number, often created via 3D printer—as one such contributor, and calls to “[r]ein in the proliferation” of such weapons, “encourage state adoption of extreme risk protection orders, and drive other executive and legislative action including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
It also called for “advancing inclusion” as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic to “mitigate xenophobia and bias.”
This would be in order to “address hate crime reporting barriers faced by disadvantaged communities by promoting law enforcement training and resources to prevent and address bias-motivated crimes,” according to the SIP.
Additionally, the plan encouraged “teaching and learning of civics education that provides students with the skill to fully participate in civic life,” and promoting “literacy education for both children and adult learners and existing proven interventions to foster resiliency to disinformation.”
The change at the border between President Biden and President Trump is nothing short of staggering, and two numbers best tell that story: 189,604 and 20.
The first is the number of illegal immigrants Border Patrol agents caught and immediately released into the U.S. in December 2023, at the depths of the Biden border chaos.
The second is the number of illegal immigrants agents caught and released into the U.S. in February — roughly one-hundredth of 1% of the total in Mr. Biden’s worst month.
For years, Border Patrol agents have been telling anyone who would listen that catch-and-release was the driver of illegal immigration.
Migrants who had a reasonable sense that they could live and work in the U.S. would pay $10,000 or more to smugglers to reach the border. If their chances of release were slim, they wouldn’t pay or make the trip.
Mr. Trump’s policies have drastically cut the chances of catch-and-release from 778 per 1,000 border crossers in December 2023 to just 2 per 1,000 in February.
“New Mexico Judge Resigns After Housing Alleged Tren De Aragua Member. The resignation occurred a few days after law enforcement arrested illegal alien Cristhian Ortega-Lopez…Democrat Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano resigned after police arrested an alleged Tren De Aragua (TdA) gang member.”
FBI Director Kash Patel announced Friday that the bureau has arrested Judge Hannah Dugan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin on charges of obstruction, accusing the Dugan of obstructing an arrest of illegal immigrants last week.
“We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject — an illegal alien — to evade arrest,” Patel said in a brief statement shared on X – which was subsequently deleted and re-posted. “Thankfully our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public.”
The days when Democrats can blithely ignore immigration laws are coming to a close.
Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), the second most powerful Senate Democrat, announced Wednesday his decision not to run for another term after nearly three decades in the world’s greatest deliberative body.
Durbin, 80, is ending his Senate career after five terms, the longest tenure of any Senator in Illinois history. His retirement opens up a deep blue seat in 2026 and will create a leadership competition for Senate Democrats amid frustration with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and generational turnover within the party.
Remember, in Minnesota, crimes aginst designed hate objects are perfectly legal. “Progressive Minnesota Prosecutor Lets State Employee Off with No Charges for Alleged Tesla Vandalism.”
The Hennepin County Attorney’s office is seeking diversion for Minnesota Department of Human Service employee Dylan Adams after he allegedly vandalized at least six Teslas in Minneapolis while walking his dog….
Progressive County Attorney Mary Moriarty took office in 2023 and has faced strong criticism for her soft-on-crime approach. On several occasions, Moriarty has shown leniency to violent criminals, including suspects charged with murder and sexual assault, leading to disputes with prosecutors and outrage among victims’s families.
Is she Soros-backed? You better believe it. I hope Elon Musk sues all of them for everything they own…
Well, this is disturbing. “Stunned cops allegedly find 180K rounds of ammo packed in minivan driven by two Mexican nationals.”
Two Mexican nationals pulled over in a routine traffic stop in Colorado were found with 180,000 illegal rounds of ammunition in the back of their van, according to federal prosecutors.
Caesar Ramon Martinez Solis, 41, and Humberto Ivan Amador Gavira, 24, were pulled over late last month for failing to dim their headlights and using a turn signal in Canon City, 35 miles southwest of Colorado Springs, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado.
Officers then found 180 boxes stacked in the back of the van — each labeled as having 1,000 rounds of ammo, mostly .308 but also 30 boxes of 7.62, the feds said.
Ammunition in back of minivan.
The federal government’s main website on COVID-19 information has been taken down and replaced with a new version discarding the natural-origin theory of the coronavirus that was pushed by the Biden administration.
Where the previous website pushed vaccine and testing information, the White House is now displaying scientific proof that the virus was man-made and leaked from a Chinese virus lab while calling out U.S. officials and agencies that it says “obstructed” the truth from the American people.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is named along with Dr. Peter Daszak, Dr. David Morens and other public officials who are accused of engaging in “a multi-year campaign of delay, confusion, and non-responsiveness in an attempt to obstruct the Select Subcommittee’s investigation” and to hide incriminating evidence.”
Now will Democrats finally accept the truth, or continue clinging to the “wet market” origins like they cling to all their other lockdown lies?
“Hegseth Denounces Journalists Who ‘Won’t Give Back Their Pulitzers for Discredited Stories as Pulitzer Board Facing String of Setbacks in Trump’s Lawsuit. He insists he is the subject of ‘hit pieces that ‘come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax.'” Soon the legacy media can be financially, as well as factually and morally, bankrupt.
So the Russians captured a Bradley in Ukraine. After analyzing how it compares to their own BMPs, they want one.
The Russians have gotten a closeup look at an M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle and seem to like it better than their own armored vehicles.
The Bradley offers more protection and can fire more accurately than its Russian equivalent, the BMP-3, according to a Russian report that was leaked onto a Telegram channel earlier this month.
Experts told Task & Purpose that the report appears to be legitimate.
Priority legislation that would raise the homestead exemption for elderly and disabled homeowners by $50,000 passed the Texas Senate on Wednesday. With other planned exemption increases, elderly homeowners would receive a total of $200,000 in homestead exemptions.
Senate Bill (SB) 23 and Senate Joint Resolution (SJR) 85 raise the school tax homestead exemption — a reduction in the taxable value of a home — for age 65 and over homeowners from $10,000 to $60,000. The proposal is estimated to cost the state $1.2 billion through the next biennium.
Both passed by a 30 to 1 vote with the lone “no” coming from state Sen. Nathan Johnson (D-Dallas), which is the first “no” vote against a homestead exemption increase in the Senate in multiple sessions.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick prefaced this proposal in an early-April press conference, during which he said he and Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) were working together on the item.
This is on top of the planned standard homestead exemption increase from $100,000 to $140,000.
Just in case you hadn’t heard: Pope Francis dead at 88. “The pope, who led the Catholic Church for twelve years, passed away just one day after Easter Sunday when the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Despite his ongoing health problems, he made several appearances during Holy Week, including a trip to St. Peter’s Basilica and a visit with Vice President JD Vance on Sunday.” Sic transit gloria mundi.
Hijacking thwarted. “A U.S. man hijacked a small plane in Belize on Thursday, stabbing two passengers and a pilot, before one of the stabbed passengers fatally shot him, officials in Belize and the United States said. The plane then landed safely.”
Pizzo, considered a possible candidate for governor in 2026, said unaffiliated voters helped elect him to office. He added that the state party needed new leadership, but Democratic leaders didn’t want him to be it. The party that his late father volunteered for in the 1960s, he said, “is not the party today.”
“Here’s the issue: The Democratic Party in Florida is dead. But there are good people that can resuscitate it. But they don’t want it to be me,” he said.
Pizzo’s stunning announcement — which caught Democrats completely by surprise — of a switch to no party affiliation is just the latest blow for Florida’s beleaguered Democratic Party. The state currently has 1.2 million more registered Republicans than Democrats, and no Democrat holds statewide elected office — a far cry from Florida’s former status as the ultimate swing state.
It’s got to hurt to have the Minority leader of the third largest state in the union leave your party because it’s too radical. Especially since a quarter century ago Florida was still The Land of the Hanging Chad…
Florida party switch shenanigans the second: “David Jolly, a former Republican U.S. Congressman in Florida’s 13th Congressional District who left the GOP amid his distaste for President Donald Trump, has now registered as a Democrat. He’s also launched a political committee, Florida 2026, ahead of what many expect to be a gubernatorial bid.” I doubt someone who left office in 2017 is going to be at the top of anyone’s list, and Charlie Crist’s post-Republican career hardly offers a blueprint for success in Florida politics…
“Disgraced former Representative George Santos (R., N.Y.) was sentenced Friday to 87 months in federal prison for wire fraud and identity theft, completing his remarkable rise and fall from a newly elected swing-seat congressman to widely ridiculed conman whose colleagues expelled him from the House..”
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has opened an investigation into Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) over donations made to her 2024 campaign by the Democratic fundraising organization Act Blue.
The FEC began its probe after receiving a complaint from the conservative Coolidge-Reagan Foundation in late March.
The complaint alleges that Crockett received 53 separate donations of $595 from a 73 year old supporter named Randy Best through the Act Blue portal.
However, when one of Crockett’s opponents for 2026 spoke to Best’s wife, she denied that the couple knew anything about donations, raising concerns that the Act Blue donations may have been made by others with donations being given under false names.
Crockett’s campaign received more than $870,000 in donations through Act Blue.
At this point, I think we have to assume that ActBlue was consciously constructed to enable fraud.
In the latest scandal to rock the state’s largest public school district, on Friday, a federal jury found Houston Independent School District’s (HISD) former chief operating officer, Brian Busby, and vendor Anthony Hutchison, guilty on 33 charges related to a long-running bribery scheme.
The scheme, which prosecutors say began as early as 2011, included kickbacks to Busby as well as cash payments to former HISD board president Rhonda Skillern-Jones and multiple other officials in exchange for lucrative contracts for construction, landscaping, mowing, and maintenance at district schools.
In some instances, Hutchison overbilled the district by $6 million through his exclusive contract to provide mowing and landscaping for the entire district. He also obtained contracts through Skillern-Jones to complete projects at several schools using funds derived from a 2012 voter-approved bond referendum.
After a trial that lasted nearly four weeks, both Busby and Hutchison were convicted on charges of conspiracy, bribery, filing false tax returns, and witness tampering. Hutchison was also convicted of wire fraud.
Skillern-Jones, who also later served as a Houston Community College trustee and worked for Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis (D-Pct. 1), entered a plea deal in 2021 and admitted that she had received $12,000 in cash from Busby in a Walmart parking lot.
Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld says that the people at the top of Marvel comics, Dan Buckley, David Bogart and David Gabriel, have done a horrible job, especially with X-Men, and have to be fired.
And speaking of people getting fired for being bad at their job, Alyssa Mercante fired from Kotaku. Asmongold: “Put the fries in the bag.”
Happy Valentine’s Day! Or, as I call it in my house, “Passover.” DOGE uncovers more infuriating waste and fraud, another job number revision downward, a bit on the Russo-Ukrainian War, a Second Amendment ruling, and the Babylon Bee offers up a double-shot of Tolkien.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“HHS Spent over $22 Billion on Giveaways to Illegal Immigrants over Past Four Years.”
The Department of Health and Human Services spent $22.6 billion on assistance to illegal immigrants from 2020 to 2024 as border crossings hit all-time highs, a new watchdog report shows.
The HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement, a unit that lost track of 32,000 migrant children, distributed the bulk of the funds to nonprofit organizations during President Joe Biden’s term, according to a report from government spending watchdog Open the Books, first reported by the New York Post.
In fiscal year 2023 alone, the ORR doled out $10 billion worth of grants as the Biden administration expanded the number of illegal aliens eligible for assistance. HHS distributed obligated funds of $2.6 billion in 2020, $2.3 billion in 2021, and $4.2 billion in fiscal year 2024. Over that time period, the Biden administration allowed record numbers of illegal immigrants to cross the southern border and remain in the country.
Some of the ORR money went towards a program that helped illegal immigrants save for car and home purchases, while another program distributed business and personal loans to help migrants build credit. Additional funds were allocated toward providing migrants with “legal assistance,” “cultural orientation,” and “emergency housing support.”
“ORR is part of a troubling trend of using nonprofit groups as ideological proxies. Vast sums are being outsourced to evade accountability and prop up an immoral, exploitive system that is hurtful to both American citizens and people in other countries who are longing for a better life,” Open The Books CEO John Hart told the Post.
Heh: “Terrified staff left hysterical as ‘well drilled’ DOGE nerds storm hyper ‘woke’ Department of Education.”
Elon Musk’s nerd army stormed into the Department of Education on Tuesday and saved over $900 million.
Musk’s DOGE lieutenants Akash Bobba and Ethan Shaotran, both 22, already have access to the department, NBC News reported.
And as many as 16 DOGE team members have entered the premises as the agency begins to be ripped apart.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, (D-NM) described the terror agency staff are feeling after Musk’s team entered to ‘actively dismantle’ the institution.
‘They are in the building, on the 6th floor, canceling grants and contracts,’ she said in an interview with HuffPost.
The Department of Education was targeted by Donald Trump during his campaign, He is keen to dismantle the so-called ‘Deep State’ constantly working against conservatives.
Most Republicans believe the department employs some of the most activist liberal bureaucrats in the federal government.
Trump plans to sign another executive order on Tuesday to order all agencies to work with DOGE, according to Semafor, including with the ‘workplace optimization initiative.’
Snip.
The department has already terminated 89 Education Department contracts worth $881 million.
And over 29 training grants for DEI have been eliminated saving $101 million, according to the DOGE X account.
President Donald Trump campaigned on shutting down the Department of Education and sending the funding back to the states to fund their schools as they see fit.
Over the last two years, USAID had funneled $2.3 billion in “humanitarian assistance” to [Ilhan] Omar’s native Somalia. Last year it reported a request for $1.6 billion in aid and even with the Biden administration on the way out the door, it sent an additional $29 million in December 2024.
USAID support for Somalia had doubled under the Biden administration and with $3.3 billion from USAID allocated in the last 5 years, the end of the USAID gravy train for the Islamic terrorist state of Somalia must have been a painful blow for Omar, who is very close to the Somali regime. Former Somali Prime Minister Hassan Khaire had reportedly celebrated that “the interest of Ilhan are not Ilhan’s, it’s not the interest of Minnesota, nor is it the interest of the American people, the interest of Ilhan is that of the Somalian people and Somalia.”
It’s unknown if any of Omar’s Majerteen clan members benefited from the billions in American money, but considering the prominence of the clan in Somali politics, it’s likely to be the case.
Somalia, along with other Islamic terrorist entities, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, were among the top beneficiaries of USAID cash.
USAID boasted of having sent $2.1 billion to Gaza and the West Bank since the Hamas attacks of Oct 7. In 2024 alone, $917 million was programmed for the terrorist areas occupying Israel.
USAID provided over $3.7 billion to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over with $832 million in the previous fiscal year alone. The money was so unaccountable that USAID refused to cooperate with the U.S. Government’s Afghan War watchdog tracking money going to terrorists.
Even while the United States of America was at war with the Houthis, the Iran-backed Islamic terrorist group firing on US Navy vessels, USAID continued to direct billions of dollars to Yemen.
In 2024, USAID announced a $2.7 billion aid request for Yemen and allocated $753 million. In the last 5 years, USAID provided an estimated $3.4 billion in aid to an enemy terror state.
Other Islamic terrorist states that have heavily drawn on USAID include Pakistan which harbored Osama bin Laden, but benefited from $600 million in the last 5 years. While some American towns and cities lacked clean drinking water, USAID labored to build plants for Pakistan’s majority Muslim population even while it engaged in the persecution of Christians.
USAID spent over $700 million on Iraq during the last 5 years even though the country has long since been governed by Iranian puppets whose militias have been firing on American soldiers.
$3.4 billion was directed to Syria over the past 5 years by USAID even as it was caught in a civil war between Shiite Islamists aligned with Iran and Sunni Islamists aligned with Al Qaeda.
USAID allocated $1.1 billion to spend on Lebanon even as the country was run by Hezbollah.
While USAID is unable to function in Iran, between Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, over $8 billion was sent to Iranian puppet regimes even without counting the money spent on Gaza.
In total, USAID had spent some $18.5 billion on Islamic terror states over those 5 years.
PA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a video released on Wednesday night that his agency has discovered an unprecedented scheme that was utilized by the Biden administration to funnel money to far-Left activist groups.
“An extremely disturbing video circulated two months ago featuring a Biden EPA political appointee talking about how they were ‘tossing gold bars off the Titanic,’ rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day,” Zeldin said.
He continued, “The gold bars were tax dollars, and tossing them off the Titanic meant the Biden administration knew they were wasting it.”
Zeldin said that he has contacted the U.S. Justice Department and the inspector general to launch investigations into the $20 billion that was transferred to an outside financial institution for the purpose of doling out funds to leftist organizations during Biden’s final days in office.
“Fortunately, my awesome team at EPA has found the gold bars,” he said. “Shockingly, roughly $20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA.”
“This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposely designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight,” he continued. “Even further, this pot of $20 billion was awarded to just eight entities that were then responsible for doling out your money to NGOs and others at their discretion with far less transparency.”
He said that the financial agreement with the bank needs to be instantly terminated and the funds need to be returned to the government.
People need to understand what Trump is doing, whether it’s intentional or not, but he is cutting off the flow of money to the pool from which a variety of left-wing groups and activist groups around the world and in the US drink.
So imagine a pool that’s being filled with money. A lot of that money comes from the programs that have been cut off by his DEI orders, Federal funding.
But a lot of it came from USAID, which is essentially an international development and development agency of the government, which has a massive, tens of billions of dollars, budget. And now we know what has been happening.
It has been like a fire hose filling up the same pool that the DEI funding filled up, and they all drink from that, and he’s cutting off that flow.
This has the potential to be absolutely devastating to the DEI and left-wing industrial complex.
We always think of it as being George Soros and people like that, and, and it is, but they all are feeding into the same pool. And Soros doesn’t have enough money to replace what the US government spends on this stuff.
That’s why they are apoplectic. That’s why they are losing their minds. That’s why they are senators are trying to break into buildings. That’s why there’s a lawsuit after lawsuit because they know if Trump is successful in cutting off the various spigots that fill the pool from which left-wing activist groups drink, they are in big trouble.
The evil that the Biden Administration did lives on in so many ways. “January Jobs Report: 2024 Employment Revised Down by 600,000.”
The federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze all funding pauses while federal spending is being assessed, has a history of anti-Trump and woke activism.
Chief Judge John McConnell Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island can be seen in video footage from 2021 accusing Trump of being “a dictator” and claiming that “racism is a white people problem” and that “we all have racism inside of us.”
Judge McConnell certainly has stupidity inside him…
Newly confirmed Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi is suing Letita James along with other New York Democratic politicians for refusing to help deport illegal aliens.
Viking was not at his normal base in the Zhytomyr region when the war started, he was in Kyiv. His race to Zhytomyr was frustrated by a lack of rail services out of the capital and ended with a walk between 25-30 miles to get to the air base, still in civilian clothes. Once there, he was very quickly in the thick of action, and from Feb. 25 on he flew air defense missions that he described as “deterrence,” first flown in daylight and later at night, over the Kyiv region.
“We held them back,” Viking explained. “If their aircraft had come here and worked freely, everything would have been completely different.”
Viking and his fellow 39th Tactical Aviation Brigade (39 BrTA) pilots faced a significant disadvantage in terms of radars and missiles compared to the Russians. While Ukrainian fighters could occasionally track enemy aircraft, getting within missile-launch range was rarely possible.
The Ukrainian Air Force began the war with around 32 Su-27s operational within two brigades, the 39 brTA at Ozerne in the Zhytomyr region of northwestern Ukraine and the 831 brTA at Myrhorod in the Poltava region of central Ukraine. At least 15 Ukrainian Flankers have been visually confirmed as destroyed but, in the meantime, additional examples have also been returned to airworthiness after overhauls. The aircraft are also regularly moved around between different operating locations, some of them austere in nature, making it harder for the Russians to target them.
Snip.
In these early days, Viking’s available intelligence on Russian air defenses was scrawled on a piece of map that he’d torn off, with information vital for survival being exchanged by word of mouth between pilots. The map simply showed the best route into a given area, with circles showing the approximate engagement ranges of hostile air defenses.
The primary job at this time was attempting to blunt the advance of Russian tactical aircraft flying from Belarus. “We were the only ones here, to put it bluntly. We were the first line of defense, and they were constantly trying to sneak their Su-34s and Su-35s in at night, at extremely low altitudes.”
Complicating their job was the fact that, according to Viking, the avionics and missiles of the Ukrainian Su-27s, at this time, were “two generations behind” those of the Russians. Within these parameters, “the battle was reduced to trying to get closer to [the Russians].” But even if that was possible, the Ukrainian Su-27 pilots were rarely able to get within the launch parameters of their missiles, with the Russian jets always having the opportunity to launch weapons first.
“Even though our [missile] launches had short ranges, we still tried something, we launched missiles, we held the Russians back, and we repelled these attacks every night,” Viking explains. “Almost every pilot flew two, sometimes three sorties each night.”
Also a lot of interesting discussion about how western munitions (HARM missiles and JDAMs in particular) have improved their chances.
Object to not deporting illegal aliens? Expect a beating from those “mostly peaceful” protestors.
“Harris County Comes Up Short on Funds For Planned Flood Control Projects. One set of projects for subdivisions may face a shortage of nearly $140 million.” Is there anything in the article that indicates where the real problem lies? Why yes, there is: “The framework, which has been slightly revised since then, shifts from targeting areas with the most damage to adding consideration of the Social Vulnerability Index and areas with lower incomes.” There’s no institution so robust that adding social justice to it can’t beat it out of whack…
Crazy story out of Columbine High School (yes, that one) in Colorado.
A friend of the student’s mom, Heather McCormick, accused a female teacher of grooming the teen girl at school. According to the allegation, she then worked with the school to secretly change the girl’s status to “homeless” so she could legally move out of her parents’ home … and into the teacher’s home.
The unnamed mom discovered thousands of phone calls and texts between the two, which revealed that the female teacher had, at the minimum, been making out with the student.
When the student’s mom went to the principal to let him know that a predator teacher had been sexually grooming her daughter, this is how the principal reportedly responded: “Ms. Kearney takes interest in helping kids navigate their sexuality.”
In two speeches given less than 24 hours apart in the French city of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Mélenchon delivered some of the most shocking yet brutally honest words from a European politician, openly calling for the older French to be replaced by a “Creole” generation of mixed races and cultures.
The leader of France’s far-left LFI is calling outright for replacement of White French people, conjuring up the Great Replacement term that has been demonized as a conspiracy theory by the left for years.
“In our country, one person in four has a foreign grandparent. 40% of the population speaks at least two languages. We are destined to be a Creole nation and so much the better! May the young generation be the great replacement for the old generation,” said Mélenchon.
“Burrows Promises Trump: Texas House Will Pass School Choice. Both the House and Senate budget proposals currently allocate $1 billion for education savings accounts.” Color me skeptical. The Democrat-backed cabal backing burrows has made killing school choice a priority in the past
“A US Navy aircraft carrier has collided with a merchant ship off the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea, a US Sixth Fleet spokesman revealed Thursday. The collision involved the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and the merchant vessel Besiktas-M at around noon local time on Wednesday.” Fortunately there was no lose of life, but there’s a whole lot of stupid to go around for this one. At 189 meters, or over 620 feet, the Besiktas-M certainly isn’t small, but the Harry S. Truman is over 1,000 feet long.
Facebook lays off 4,000 workers, some of whom say they had glowing performance reviews last year.
Good news! Trump rescinds Biden’s plastic straw ban! There seems to be no end of the woke making your life more difficult to display their own climate virtue…
“Microsoft Drops USAID-Funded NewsGuard After Ted Cruz Starts Digging. Microsoft has dropped NewsGuard, a left-wing fact checking organization they partnered with that has helped the advertising industry justify blacklists for independent conservative media sites such as ZeroHedge.” Good.
Disney is in a weird place right now. They’ve sort of, kind of, announced that (like most of the rest of corporate America) they’re backing away from wokeness, to the extent that they’re cutting woke storylines from Pixar properties, and Disney was able to course correct in enough time to make Moana 2 and Inside Out 2 big hits last year (plus Deadpool & Wolverine, which I suspect was too rude to ever be infected with wokeness), but the company itself is still infected with DEI, and they still have an awful lot of very expensive turds, conceived and crafted in the woke era, sliding down the alimentary release canal.
First up: Captain America: Brave New World, due to plop out February 14 (because it’s just perfect Valentine’s Day fare) after numerous poor test screenings. Re-shoots have reportedly pumped the budget up to a staggering $375 million, which would put it among the ten most expensive films of all time and means that, by traditional Hollywood metrics, the film would have to take in close to a billion dollars to make a profit. It’s not even remotely on track for that.
“It’s tracking round about the same level as The Eternals at the moment.” “Not a win.” The Eternals made $402 million worldwide, which would be a financial disaster for Captain America: Brave New World.
But that’s not the only woke-era disaster cued up for Disney, as the widely reviled live-action Snow White remake is coming out in March. Honestly, all this is just an excuse to post this video featuring comments on the Snow White trailer…sung and set to music.
So that’s two expensive, high profile bombs Disney has to flush out of the system before they can release movies that have better than a snowball’s chance in Hell of making a profit. Disney’s streaming business is finally profitable, but that’s after $11 billion worth of losses to recoup. Park revenue was up, but profits from it down. And ESPN profit has been down enough that they laid off some 300 staffers, part of a $7.5 billion cost-cutting effort introduced by Iger. But that didn’t keep Iger’s own compensation from increasing to $41.1 million, up 30% from FY2023.
Video game YouTuber Asmongold documents some interesting behavior in the new video game Marvel Rivals: It censors your text messages if you try to say anything critical of Communist China.
Harris plagiarizes Wikipedia and blows off Catholics, Gwen Walz assigns America homework, social justice groomers keep trying to trans your kids, Williamson County’s sheriff gets accused of pay-for-play corruption, another Hamas leader eats a last meal of kosher drone, Columbia U wants to silence a pro-Israel professor, and a meat recall expands to my local supermarket.
The Biden-Harris administration announced [last] Friday that it was filing a lawsuit against the state of Virginia for enforcing voter integrity laws in the state that aim to curb illegal voting in elections.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who has a history of espousing racist views, claimed without evidence that Virginia’s move to increase election integrity was an “eleventh hour effort” intended, in part, to “disenfranchise qualified voters.”
The DOJ claimed that it was doing so because it was “too close to the Nov. 5 general election” to remove voters:
Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
However, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order requiring that non-citizens be removed from voter rolls was signed on August 7, 2024 — exactly 90 days before Election Day.
The problem is the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are not, in fact, voters because they are not citizens, said Youngkin.
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said.
Youngkin said that the lawsuit was a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.”
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.
While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences.
Nothing says “commitment to rigorous academic scholarship” quite like not just quoting verbatim from Wikipedia, but doing so incompetently.
Host of Fox News “Special Report” Bret Baier finally snagged that interview with Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris. Harris was campaigning in Washington Crossing, PA and was proud of the former Republicans and Trump administration people who took the stage with her and happy with their endorsement, delighted in their support of her as a presidential candidate.
The entire interview was a train wreck, but there were particular moments that were exceptionally cringeworthy, damaging, and proved with glaring certainty why she is unfit to lead.
Baier started off with the topic of illegal immigration, and you could visibly see Harris deflate like a balloon before the first question was asked.
Immediately Harris tried to filibuster Baier and do this interview’s version of “I’m speaking.” Harris brought up the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which she claimed addressed the flaws in the asylum system with more judges, 15 million more border agents, increased penalties, stemming the flow of fentanyl, shore up entry points, and how she has worked toward bipartisan efforts to strengthen the border.
Baier gently pushed back with documented facts, and Harris briefly got that deer in headlights look she gets when she is desperately trying to find her talking points. Then she jumped on her supposed record as California Attorney General (not her current position as VP) as proof that she knew how to handle this crisis. Failing to understand that the fact that a crisis exists is proof that you have no ability to correct it.
But the most purely evil and damning part of this topic of illegal immigration was the fact that Harris could not even form the words to apologize for allowing criminals into the country that resulted in the senseless deaths of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin.
Former president Donald Trump poked fun at vice president Kamala Harris during the Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, criticizing his political rival for failing to show up at the charity event in person.
Harris addressed the crowd at the white-tie event, which raises funds for Catholics charities, in a pre-recorded video – a highly unusual move for a presidential candidate. It has become a tradition for presidential candidates to speak at the event since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960.
The vice president is the first presidential contender to skip out on the dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984.
There’s an auspicious precedent.
“I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” Trump said.
He went on to joke that Harris must be “out receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” a reference to a viral video from earlier this month of the Michigan governor feeding a chip to a leftist influencer on her knees.
Trump accused the vice president of being “disrespectful to Catholics.”
He also quipped about the Democratic nominee’s odd’s of winning the election, saying, “There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris but I’m not worried about them. Their wives and their wives’ lovers are voting for me.”
Does Kamala Harris need a mea culpa in PA? Or does her disconnect from voters in the Rust Belt go beyond state lines and religion?
That question has rolled around in my head since reading William McGurn’s column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. McGurn uses Gretchen Whitmer’s bizarre mockery of the Catholic Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat to argue that the Democrat anointee for the presidency now has a Whitmer-created problem. But is that entirely true, or does it go beyond Whitmer’s blasphemy?
McGurn recognizes a broader problem, but perhaps not its scope. First, he outlines the direct issues with Catholics, who comprise 30% of Pennsylvania:
As California’s attorney general, Ms. Harris signed several friend-of-the-court briefs opposing religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby and religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She said she was “proud” to have co-sponsored California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices about where women could get an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2018 rejected the law as a likely violation of the First Amendment.
But perhaps Ms. Harris’s most notorious Catholic moment came after she was elected senator. When Brian Buescher was nominated for a federal judgeship, she grilled him about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization. Although President John F. Kennedy was also a Knight, Ms. Harris treated the group as though it were the Ku Klux Klan.
She would later co-sponsor the Equality Act, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops said could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortions they oppose. Last month she snubbed New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan by declining to attend this Thursday’s Al Smith dinner, an election-year staple that has brought Democratic and Republican candidates together in a civil setting for decades.
Those are the direct issues, and those aren’t limited to Pennsylvania. Overall, Republicans now have a statistically significant edge in party ID among Catholics, according to Pew polling this year, 50/44. Nationally, Catholics accounted for 25% of the vote in 2020, although apparently pollsters didn’t include data on religion in state-level exit polling. One can expect a similarly significant number of Catholics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps slightly lower levels in states like Arizona and Georgia. In every state, however, Catholics make up a far larger part of the electorate than the Arab-Americans did in Michigan, and yet both Biden and Harris obsessed over their support all year long.
That’s one problem, but that’s not the only problem. A more recent Pew poll shows Harris trailing Donald Trump with Catholics by five points, even worse than Hillary Clinton performed in 2016. But the issue isn’t entirely religious:
Mr. Biden may be the last of the big-time Democrats whose base was the white working class. But it confers a sensibility Ms. Harris is conspicuously lacking. …
Politico reports that Ms. Harris’s prospects are “considerably dicier” because of a “cultural dissonance” between her progressive San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians.
That gets closer to the real danger for Democrats, but it has less to do with “white” and “Catholic” than it does to working class. Biden had a political and cultural connection to working-class voters, not just because of his Catholicism but because of his background. He fit into that milieu even if that mainly came as a conceit, especially after fifty years in Washington DC, but he could talk in their language too … at least before his brain turned to jelly. People keep overlooking his 2012 address to the Democrat convention, which turned out to be the best of the week, in which he artfully bridged the gap between the working class and the Academia-drenched elite that had mainly taken over the party in the current generation.
Harris simply can’t do that. Not only is she incapable of connecting at anywhere near that level, she only recently even showed a desire to do so. Her lame attempt at repeating the mantra “I was raised in a middle-class household” ad nauseam is about as close as she gets. Culturally, she comes from the Academia-drenched elite and speaks their language, to the extent she speaks any political language effectively at all. Harris tosses around clichés as a means to connect to working class voters, which initially appeared to appeal to them but have turned into a major liability now.
The Democratic Party’s naked contempt for both religious believers and the actual working class has been evident for a long, long time.
More on the subject: “Blowing Off the Al Smith Dinner Might Have Cost Harris Pennsylvania — and the Election.”
The Catholic vote is not as monolithic as it used to be. In 1928, the Catholic vote was overwhelmingly Democratic, concentrated in urban centers. By 1960, the Catholic vote was fracturing through intermarriage and economic issues, but Kennedy still received about 65% of the vote from his co-religionists.
Today, Donald Trump can expect to get about 60% of the Catholic vote. In Pennsylvania, The Catholic vote might be pivotal in a state that Harris absolutely, positively has to win.
“Her San Francisco progressive persona isn’t a good fit for Joe Biden’s native state,” William McGurn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday.
Snip. “In an election in Pennsylvania that will almost certainly be decided by less than 100,000 votes, Harris skipping the Al Smith Dinner was not only stupid but might be the mistake that cost her the White House.” Eh, probably not. Harris will probably lose the election because she’s part of an administration had presided over a wretched economy and let in millions of illegal aliens. Plus she’s a horrible candidate that literally nobody voted for. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Google is up to its old tricks, “hiding Conservative news on election 23 pages deep.””When using the search term “donald trump presidential race 2024,” researchers had to scroll through 23 pages of results before they come to a U.S.-based right-leaning news source, a single Fox News video six results down on the 23rd page.”
An excerpt from the book Walz' wife was reading to children shows them all riding the gay dad while he puts a vacuum cleaner up to his mouth. I'm sure it's nothing. From: Bathe the Cat. pic.twitter.com/2npr5s6mDN
Gwen Walz also seems to feel that the best way to get men to the polls is assigning them homework.
Can you put some really money behind that and put it on air? Maybe during college football?
There are still men out there who don’t hate this campaign with every fiber of their being, and I think this ad could be enough to nag them right into Trump’s arms. https://t.co/vk6jwJY9oM
Yes, social justice warrior teachers do want to trans your kids. “Court Shuts Down BLM Teacher Trying To Force Trans Ideologies On Kids.”
Megan Williams is a first-grade teacher who forced her 6 and 7-year-old students to “observe” so-called Transgender Awareness Day. This Black Lives Matter activist subjected these small children to non-curricular propaganda about “gender identity” and sex changes.
Williams disturbingly went so far as to tell these kids that their “parents ma[d]e a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl” and may have been wrong. Parents complained, but Williams was backed by her school principal and superintendent.
Three mothers fired back by filing a lawsuit against Williams, the school, the district, and district officials in June of 2022. Their goal was to obtain a moratorium “on gender dysphoria and transgender transitioning,” parental notice and opt-out rights on the topic absent such a prohibition, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Thankfully, Judge Joy Conti of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania just ruled largely in favor of these mothers.
Judge Conti stated that “parents have a constitutional right to reasonable and realistic advance notice and the ability to opt their elementary-age children of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics and to not have requirements for notice and opting out of those topics that are more stringent than those for other sensitive topics.”
Here’s the remarks in the aired clip shared by Johnson:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%…The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
And here — I’ll put it in bold — is what CBS edited out for the broadcast:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%, and when I was there on the ground, and you should go, I mean, bring the cameras and talk to the people there, they’ll tell you, don’t- don’t take politicians words for this or the administration’s word, talk to the people there on the ground they had not been provided the resources almost two weeks out from the storm that they desperately needed. And when I was there 13 days, post- you know, post the storm hitting that state, people are still being rescued. They’re stuck in the higher elevations in the mountains because the roads are down and all the rest. So they need every- every available resource and all hands on deck. The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
Issues in the debate ranged from abortion to the border crisis, and allowing boys in girls’ sports.
On abortion, Cruz said he supported Texas’ pro-life laws while acknowledging that other states would make different decisions.
“In Texas, we overwhelmingly support that parents should be notified and have to consent before their child gets an abortion. In Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that late-term abortions in the eighth and ninth months, that’s too extreme. And I’ll tell you, in Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that taxpayer money shouldn’t pay for abortions,” said Cruz.
He went on to attack his opponent’s position on abortion as extreme, noting that Allred “voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental notification law. He voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental consent law. He voted to legalize late-term abortions, including the eighth and ninth months.”
Allred, meanwhile, said he would fight to “restore a woman’s right to choose” and to “make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again.”
Snip.
One of the biggest issues playing out in the campaign thus far has been Allred’s position on allowing boys in girls’ sports. The issue has been the target of Cruz’s campaign ads and led to Allred denying the accusations, despite voting against legislation to protect girls sports.
“I know a lot of y’all at home, for example, saw two biological men competing in women’s boxing at the Olympics,” said Cruz. “That was wildly unfair. You know, my youngest daughter plays volleyball. It’s not fair for a biological boy or man, a teenage boy, to spike the volleyball at her, and he has voted repeatedly in favor of that.”
FEMA’s entanglement with the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open southern border policies by diverting storm relief funds ($1.4 billion, according to NYPost) for illegal and legal aliens may have undermined the federal agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies, such as the Katrina-like disaster unfolding in the US Southeast.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dropped the bombshell [two weeks ago]: FEMA “does not have the funds” to see Americans through the rest of this Atlantic hurricane season. The federal agency drained the funds by prioritizing taxpayer funds for illegal and legal aliens versus US citizens as the Biden-Harris globalist team rolled out the red carpet to anyone, even terrorists, via the open southern borders.
Connect the dots, if you can,” Tim Murtaugh, an adviser to former President Trump’s campaign, wrote on X, adding, “DHS says FEMA might not have enough cash to help people through hurricane season. But in 2 years of a new Biden-Harris program, they’ve spent $1 BILLION on housing and other services for migrants.”
Shedding a whole heck of a lot of color on the situation, Savanah Hernandez, a reporter for Turning Point USA, wrote on X that she has uncovered some of the “first looks” inside fully furnished luxury apartments for migrants that received free rent and utilities for two years.
Hernandez wrote in a note on The Post Millennial:
The Brunswick Landing apartments in Maine sparked controversy earlier this year when it was discovered that homeless migrants in the area were getting the opportunity to live in the units rent-free for up to two years. Migrants living in the apartments shared that not only is the rent-free, the utilities are paid and we got an inside look at the furnished apartments that would run the average American about $2,300 dollars.
“FEMA: Disaster Relief No Longer About Emergency Response, It’s About ‘Disaster Equity.'”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposed to be the government’s premier emergency relief organization in times of disaster, like the situation now faced by victims of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath in North Carolina and Tennessee.
But according to the FEMA website, the agency now places higher priority on instituting Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity guidelines than on easing the suffering of Americans displaced by disaster.
Among the goals listed in FEMA’s strategic plan are to:
Instill equity as a foundation for emergency management
Lead whole of community in climate resilience
Promote and sustain a ready FEMA & prepared nation
What does that look like in action?
Here’s an example of a FEMA disaster preparedness meeting where participants discuss how LGBTQIA individuals were suffering disproportionally before the storm compared to other disaster victims.
Notice how the focus shifts from doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people to ensuring that they are promoting “equity in disaster relief.”
Social justice is racist poison that ruins everything, and now it’s costing Americans their lives.
Here we go again. “Report: Migrant Caravans Leaving Southern Mexico Headed Toward US Border.”
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has declared a “blood feud” against three federal lawmakers from neighboring North Caucasus republics in his first comments on last month’s deadly shooting outside the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries.
Kadyrov has vowed to help Vladislav Bakalchuk, the estranged husband of Wildberries CEO Tatiana Kim — Russia’s wealthiest woman — to return his wife and block the merger of their e-commerce giant with the smaller outdoor advertising group Russ.
The family and business dispute escalated last month when Bakalchuk led a group of men to Wildberries’ Moscow offices and allegedly tried to force their way into the building. Two security guards, who were ethnic Ingush, were killed in the shootout and multiple felony charges, including murder, were filed against Bakalchuk and several other ethnic Chechens involved in the incident.
Kadyrov is a piece of work, but one with a sufficiently strong independent power base that Putin has felt compelled to buy him off. Kadyrov declaring a blood fued against Russian officials probably isn’t a sign of harmony in Russia’s government…
Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.
A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.
The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.
The Israelis did not choose the way this war began, but they will be the authors of its conclusion. And the end is near. The Israelis have brought the Gaza Strip closer to its day of liberation from the tyranny of an illegitimate terrorist regime than all the combined efforts of the peace processors in the global diplomatic corps ever achieved. It is a shame that the American administration that stood so stalwartly with Israel at the outset of this campaign willingly sacrificed its ability to celebrate alongside its Israeli counterparts. This should be America’s victory, too. But by spending months on end agonizing over how Israel was achieving its honorable objective, the Biden White House and its allies lost sight of our shared strategic goals.
We hit the Houthis with B-2s. I didn’t have that on my 2024 dance card…
“Williamson County’s Democrat Sheriff Accused of Accepting Pay-to Play Donation. On September 24, the Williamson County Commissioners Court issued a contract for over $500,000 to Family Hospital Management Company for ‘Jail Inmate Psychological Services’. Just four days before a county contract was issued, [Democrat Sheriff Mike] Gleason received a $20,000 campaign donation from the founder and CEO of the company that received the contract.” “Jail Inmate Psychological Services” sounds like a great avenue for leftwing graft…
“A North Carolina Democratic county leader, who is also running for a seat in the state House, was arrested after allegedly stealing Trump signs near a road last week. Moore County, North Carolina, County Chair Lowell Simon, 68, was charged with two counts of misdemeanor larceny of political signs after he admitted to removing Trump signs and keeping them in his car.”
“The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian says she ‘woke up’ after being molested by LA homeless man and ‘the good people’ slammed her for talking about it. Kasparian described feeling “politically homeless” and shared how the backlash she received from liberals after the assault played a key role in her reevaluation.” Seems like social justice warriors feel that being molested by a homeless man or raped by an illegal alien is a small price to pay for taxpayer-subsidized abortion…
Boy dressed as girl assaults actual girl, gives her a concussion and blurred vision. You know what the school administrators did, don’t you? That’s right, they suspended the victim.
“Edgewood ISD Superintendent Gets Raise While Students Are Failing. Edgewood ISD extended Superintendent Eduardo Hernández’s contract until 2029 and raised his annual salary to $291,923.””Only 23 percent of Edgewood ISD students can read, write, and do math at or above grade level.” Edgewood is on the west side of San Antonio.
Columbia U is trying to make their campus Judenfrei.
Columbia University is temporarily suspending a prominent pro-Israel business professor’s access to campus after he publicly criticized school officials for permitting anti-Israel campus demonstrations on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Columbia notified Israeli-American business professor Shai Davidai on Tuesday that he will be banned from campus for violating university policy on harassing school employees.
On Tuesday night, Davidai posted a video on social media accusing Columbia of retaliating against him for posting a video of himself asking Columbia’s chief operating officer Cas Halloway why he allowed pro-Hamas demonstrators to protest on the anniversary of October 7.
“Right now I was supposed to be at the school of social work at Columbia, where the Jewish students are holding their own memorial service for the senseless violence of October 7th. But then I got a call from my lawyer, who says the university has decided to not allow me to be on campus anymore,” Davidai said.
“Why? Because of October 7th. Because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob. And because I was not afraid to expose Mr. f**king Cas Holloway for not doing anything about it.”
Davidai should sue them over equal rights violation for millions. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated toolsets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the Internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.
One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different toolset created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.
The practice of air gapping is typically reserved for the most sensitive networks or devices connected to them, such as those used in systems for voting, industrial control, manufacturing, and power generation. A host of malware used in espionage hacking over the past 15 years (for instance, here and here) demonstrate that air gapping isn’t a foolproof protection. It nonetheless forces threat groups to expend significant resources that are likely obtainable only by nation-states with superior technical acumen and unlimited budgets. ESET’s discovery puts GoldenJackal in a highly exclusive collection of threat groups.
Then there’s this: “The basic flow of the attack is, first, infecting an Internet-connected device through a means ESET and Kaspersky have been unable to determine.” There’s a 99% chance that these air-gaped systems are being attacked through the usual human engineering or security lapse vectors. Which leaves a 1% chance of some form of electromagnetic witchcraft…
“WeightWatchers Squeezes Higher After Unveiling New Low-Cost GLP-1 Treatment…WW announced the addition of a new compounded semaglutide to its lineup to beat America’s obesity crisis sparked by the processed foods industrial complex. The new treatment starts at $129 per month, and each additional month will cost $189. This is significantly less than GLP-1 obesity treatments from big pharma, which cost north of $1,000 a month.”
Fiat/Stellantis merged with Chrysler in 2014, and now they’re threatening to shut it down in two years.
BrucePac listeria meat recall expands, now includes some HEB items.
Disney plans to slash budgets on Marvel movies going forward. On the one hand, that’s probably prudent, since it gets harder and harder to turn a profit with soaring budgets. On the other hand, Marvel’s recent problems aren’t a product of big budgets, they’re a product of wokeness and crappy scripts.
Rick Beato has an interesting video with R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills. I didn’t realize that the other three members wrote the music then handed it off to Michael Stipe, who would go off and create the lyrics by himself.
Even a flatworm can turn away from pain, and Asmongold (AKA ZackRawrr) offers a video in which studio executives reveal that ordinary American moviegoers have at long last inflicted enough pain on Hollywood studios over their attempting to shove wokeness down our throats that they’ve finally, finally gotten the message.
“Studios are assembling super fan focus groups to assess various materials for franchise projects to avoid social media backlash.” Well, at least they realize they have a problem. The problem is wokeness. If you work in Hollywood and think to yourself “Hey, can we put this ‘message’ for ‘modern audiences’ in a movie that’s in a beloved franchise,” the answer should always be “No, don’t do that.” Maybe Hollywood could hire me to be a focus group of one. Pay me an executive producer salary and run ideas by me, and I can tell you how not to ruin your bottom line doing stupid things. “No, Galadriel shouldn’t be a girlboss.” “No, you shouldn’t replace Indiana Jones with a young woman who does everything better than him.” “No, you shouldn’t make Superman gay.” It’s not rocket science. Drop me a line and I’ll help save you from your woke staffers (and yourself).
“Toxic fandoms have grown so powerful that talent executives and publicists privately bemoan the issue fear of triggering another backlash.” For “toxic fandoms,” read “ordinary fans tired of your woke bullshit.”
“‘They think the purity of the first version will never be replaced, or you’ve done something to upset the canon of a beloved franchise, and they’re going to take you down for doing so.’ That’s exactly right. I’m glad they understand.” We don’t watch something based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien to take in the vapid natterings of a pink-haired, 20-something gender studies major who thinks she can do a better job than the greatest fantasy writer of the 20th century. Go write your own books, you shallow snowflake loser. Leave ours alone. If you don’t love and respect Tolkien, don’t adapt Tolkien. If you don’t love and respect Star Wars, don’t write Star Wars. If you don’t like and respect existing D.C. and Marvel superheroes, don’t write them. See how this works? If you don’t respect the source material, we don’t care about your “spin.” Bugger off.
“The problem is that the fan base wants you to maintain what the original story was and not change the story.” That’s because we liked the original store and hate the woke garbage you’ve replaced it with.
“‘Fear of inadvertently triggering another backlash kept several studios from speaking for this story, even in the background.’ I think this is a good thing.” Damn straight. Screw up beloved franchises and fans will stay away in droves, and tell all their friends to stay away in droves. And not only will we stay away, we’ll actively hope that every social justice warrior working so hard to ruin the source material loses their jobs.
“We’re trying to put this agenda that we want to have in, like, this show. The fans don’t like it. Now the fans are the problem? No, you’re the problem for trying to force it into the show. You either meet the audience expectations, or you die.” Damn straight. The people that told you to should replace Jedi with lesbian space witches are the problem. They’re the ones that should be fired and never allowed to destroy your shareholder value ever again. The fans were the ones telling you not to set that giant pile of money on fire, and everyone in Kathleen Kennedy’s chain of command was going “Nah, it’ll be fine!”
“‘They’ll just tell us if you do that, the fans are going to retaliate.’ This is a good decision. You know what this shows? It shows that we’re winning. You don’t get to morally obligate an audience to buy your product. That’s not how the world works. Nobody has to do that.”
He points out early Sonic the Hedgehog footage feedback as an example of a non-political example of fans telling a studio they’re screwing up, and the studio listening. “They fixed it and they made it the way that people wanted, and now they’re making Sonic 3 with Keanu Reeves as Shadow.”
“If the companies are making products and people don’t like them, then they’re not going to sell. And that’s it. That’s the bottom line. Literally nothing else matters.”
Social Justice destroys everything it touches. Disney spent billions acquiring valuable cash cow franchises and then woke employees turned them into money losing failures. The woke insisting that Lightyear needed more gay lost Disney tons of money and goodwill. The staffers who kept wokeness out of Inside Out 2 made Disney a billion dollars. That and Deadpool and Wolverine proved that fans will still flock to theaters if you just stop trying to shove “The Message” down their throats and simply give them what they want.
Or you can keep trying wokeness and continue to enjoy the massive layoffs happening all across Hollywood.
Your choice.
It’s the woke that are toxic. It’s the fans that are trying to keep them from setting billions of dollars in shareholder value on fire.
Right now Hollywood is taking it on the chin, the gut, the head, and just about every other metaphorical body part that can be punched.
Thanks to the Biden Recession and its resultant inflation, people are cutting back severely on their entertainment budgets to concentrate on such luxuries as “food” and “rent.” At the same time that started to kick in, Hollywood fully embraced wokeness, resulting in movies and TV shows that alienated large segments of their existing customer base. From 2015 to 2019, Hollywood brought in more than $11 billion in domestic box office, thanks largely to once-juggernaut franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar (a studio that used to function like a franchise) and Jurassic Park, and even throwing out Flu Manchu-wrecked 2020, they have yet to return to that level of ticket income. Note that the first three of those franchises all belonged to Disney, which came down with one of the worst cases of Social Justice, from which hasn’t entirely recovered, and Disney stock has been on a mostly steadily downward trend since 2021.
On top of that, the last five years saw most major studios jump headlong into the streaming wars. The result? Everyone lost except Netflix. Everyone lost money launching their streaming services, and the huge need for new content, plus the mind virus of wokeism, meant garbage like Rings of Power, Velma and She-Hulk got green-lit. For Disney, the need for content not only radically increased costs, but also helped cheapen the previous powerhouse brands of Marvel and Star Wars with too much mediocre-to-bad content.
But the jump into streaming didn’t just increase costs, it decreased the income from existing revenue streams like broadcast and cable TV (now referred to as “linear” TV). With so much premium content moving to Internet-based services, a whole lot more people cut the cord for cable TV.
While all this was happening, Hollywood’s actors and writers unions looked at the money being shoveled into streaming and went “Hey, we want a bigger cut of that,” and went on strike, some even losing their houses (which honestly for a four month strike, seems like really poor financial planning) in the process. As a result, they won pay increases and additional “seats” in writer’s rooms right before everything started to collapse.
The results? Layoffs. “During the 2023 Hollywood strikes, the Los Angeles region’s share of national Film and TV employment fell to 27%, compared to 35% just the year before.” More: “Employment is down 9.1% (12,900 jobs) from 2013 to 2024 for the traditional entertainment industries of Film and TV, Sound, Print Media and Broadcasting.” I don’t think anyone thinks of 2013 as any kind of “golden age.” (Well, except maybe for the finale of Breaking Bad.) More: “Employment in ‘motion picture and sound recording’ has grown nationwide, but the share of workers in LA or New York went from just under half at the beginning of 2023 to just one-third earlier this year.”
This is why Deadline has a regular Hollywood Contraction section. Things are so bad that they’re even laying off executives (I know, world’s smallest violin), and many don’t expect to ever be employed in the industry again. “If you’re a middle-age white man, you’re feeling really struggling to see if you’re going to be hired again.”
Let’s list a few of Hollywood’s litany of woes, some of which we’ve covered here before.
Paramount was pretty much forced to merge with Skydance, resulting in massive layoffs.
Including: “Paramount Television Studios Shut Down by Paramount Global Cost Cuts. Paramount Television Studios, a production facility originally aimed at getting Paramount Pictures back into the business of making TV series, will shut down, the latest bout of cost cutting by parent corporation Paramount Global as it seeks to eliminate $500 million amid a chaotic shift in the entertainment industry.” They were the ones producing the Time Bandits TV show for Apple+ that pretty much no one thought was a good idea.
Speaking of Apple (not strictly speaking a Hollywood company, but one that plunged into the streaming wars), they’ve throttled back the money hose after being one of the more profligate streaming spenders. “Shaw also points out some examples of runaway spending at Apple, including bloat on ‘Severance,’ its glum, well-regarded dystopian/workplace series. The new season of that show will cost $20 million an episode — a staggering sum for a series that doesn’t have any digital dragons.” $20 million an episode. Season 2 had ten episodes. At $20 a month for an Apple+ subscription, you would need to pull in nearly a million new viewers, subscribing for an entire year, to break even. Apple+’s entire subscriber base is evidently 18 million, so that seems…unlikely.
There are reports that Marvel Studios (a division of Disney) has actually purged woke producers from its ranks, but that Lucasfilms (another division of Disney) has retained head Kathleen Kennedy, whose woke girlboss storylines have run both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises into the ground.
And then, as this contraction runs its course, all of Hollywood has to worry about the looming threat of AI. AI is not good enough for Joe Schmo to make movies that rival Hollywood from his PC, but given enough computing power, we may live to see it. But in the meantime, a whole lot of technical jobs are probably going to disappear into AI expert systems. Instead of five lighting techs, there will be one lighting tech overseeing the AI automatically adjusting the networked smart lights.
It’s possible that 2019, the year when Avengers: Endgame was setting box office records, may be looked back on as the pinnacle of Hollywood’s 21st Century Golden Age…
On Critical Drinker’s Open Bar, Chris Gore of Film Threat dropped some big news: Marvel Studio has laid off all their woke producers.
Chris Gore: “I do know people who work at Marvel. They have cleaned house. They quietly, months ago, fired all the producers that would could be labeled ‘activist.'”
CG: “Unlike Lucasfilm, that is. Lucasfilm is lost. They’re lost, that’s it. They are doubling down on all the nonsense. You will never get anything good out of out of Lucasfilm and Star Wars.” So expect more lesbian space witches.
CG: “Kevin Feige recognizes it. [He] said that we tried it, it didn’t work. He’s talking about [MCU] Phase Four. That’s it. We tried it, it didn’t work.”
CG: “If Deadpool and Wolverine proves anything. You’ve heard that phrase ‘male and pale is stale?’ That was that was spoken aloud across studios. But if you look at box office this year, I would say male and pale is money.”
Critical Drinker: “It seems that Marvel are getting a bit tired of losing billions of dollars and turning their own fans against them by trying to inject ‘The Message’ into what used to be crowd-pleasing general purpose entertainment and are quietly changing course and the first step down that path is to clean house behind the scenes, getting rid of the activists and the idiots that have derailed so many projects since [Avengers] Endgame. I mean it only took them like five years to to recognize a problem that people like me have been pointing out since 2019. But hey, better late than never.”
This is all good and welcome news. However, because I want it to be true, I would like a source other than Gore to confirm that it’s actually happened. Like the names of those handed pink slips and confirmation via Twitter or Linked-In.
Also, even if it proves to be true, the rest of Disney shows no signs of purging the woke. Disney may have settled its lawsuit against Florida governor Ron DeSantis, but there’s no indication that those who decided Disney needed to take point on turning kids trans have been demoted or let go. Disney employees still donate overwhelmingly to Democrats.
I’m still going to refrain from buying tickets to any Disney studio movie (including Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, etc.) until until I see more conclusive evidence that Disney has actually abandoned its woke agenda.
A kangaroo trial reaches its kangaroo conclusion, Biden’s ludicrous Gaza pier floats away and sinks, ESG lawsuits get the green light, the Libertarians nominate a hard left social justice warrior, and the NRA picks up a Supreme Court win. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The kangaroo trial where they tried Trump on supposed violation of a federal offense in a state courtroom and the judge decreed that the jury didn’t need to come to a unanimous opinion to find Trump guilty found Trump guilty. I expect this to result in expedited appeal and equally expedited overturning.
Result? “Today, the Trump campaign announced a record-shattering small-dollar fundraising haul following the sham Biden Trial verdict totaling $34.8 million – nearly double the biggest day ever recorded for the Trump campaign on the WinRed platform.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
While the CIA is strictly prohibited from spying on or running clandestine operations against American citizens on US soil, a bombshell new “Twitter Files” report reveals that a member of the Board of Trustees of InQtel – the CIA’s mission-driving venture capital firm, along with “former” intelligence community (IC) and CIA analysts, were involved in a massive effort in 2021-2022 to take over Twitter’s content management system, as Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag report over at Shellenberger’s Public (subscribers can check out the extensive 6,800 word report here).
According to “thousands of pages of Twitter Files and documents,” these efforts were part of a broader strategy to manage how information is disseminated and consumed on social media under the guise of combating ‘misinformation’ and foreign propaganda efforts – as this complex of government-linked individuals and organizations has gone to great lengths to suggest that narrative control is a national security issue.
According to the report, the effort also involved;
a long-time IC contractor and senior Department of Defense R&D official who spent years developing technologies to detect whistleblowers (“insider threats”) like Edward Snowden and Wikileaks’ leakers;
the proposed head of the DHS’ aborted Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz, who aided US military and NATO “hybrid war” operations in Europe;
Jim Baker, who, as FBI General Counsel, helped start the Russiagate hoax, and, as Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, urged Twitter executives to censor The New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
Jankowicz (aka ‘Scary Poppins’), previously tipped to lead the DHS’s now-aborted Disinformation Governance Board, has been a vocal advocate for more stringent regulation of online speech to counteract ‘rampant disinformation.’ Jim Baker, in his capacity as FBI General Counsel and later as Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, advocated for and implemented policies that would restrict certain types of speech on the platform, including decisions that affected the visibility of politically sensitive content.
Furthermore, companies like PayPal, Amazon Web Services, and GoDaddy were mentioned as part of a concerted effort to de-platform and financially de-incentivize individuals and organizations deemed threats by the IC. This approach represents a significant escalation in the use of corporate cooperation to achieve what might essentially be considered censorship under the guise of national security.
Nina Jankowicz And The Alethea Group
Remember Nina? A huge fan of Christopher Steele – architect of the infamous Clinton-funded Dossier which underpinned the Trump-Russia hoax, and who joined the chorus of disinformation agents that downplayed the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell, Jankowicz previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, and advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship. She also oversaw the Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute.
Jankowicz compares the lack of regulation of speech on social media to the lack of government regulation of automobiles in the 1960s. She calls for a “cross-platform” and public-private approach, so whatever actions are taken are taken by Google, Facebook, and Twitter, simultaneously.
Jankowicz points to Europe as the model for regulating speech. “Germany’s NetzDG law requires social media companies and other content hosts to remove ‘obviously illegal’ speech within twenty-four hours,” she says, “or face a fine of up to $50 million.”
By contrast, in the US, she laments, “Congress has yet to pass a bill imposing even the most basic of regulations related to social media and election advertising.” -Public
In a 2020 book, How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict, Jankowicz praises a NATO cyber security expert for having created a “Center of Excellence,” a concept promoted by Renée Diresta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, in which she made the case for the (now failed) Disinformation Governance Board that Jankowicz would briefly head up.
One year later, Jankowicz began working with ‘anti-disinformation’ consulting firm, Althea Group, staffed by “former” IC analysts.
Lots more at the link.
Remember when fast food was cheap food you bought to treat kids or didn’t feel like cooking? Now 78% of Americans surveyed think it’s a luxury good they can’t afford. Thanks, Joe Biden!
Also, one of Putin’s dachas burned down, though it’s so far from the theater of operations that it may be unrelated.
“Biden’s Gaza ‘Pier to Nowhere’ a Disaster and National Embarrassment, Breaks Apart.” Evidently the pier can only work in seas with waves smaller than three feet, and 4.5′ chop and 20 MPH gusts KO’d it. Also, no less than four U.S. vessels have run aground in the process of trying to build and move this thing. That’s some mighty fine pier-building, Lou.
The Supreme Court unanimously handed the National Rifle Association a win Thursday in the gun rights group’s effort to revive a 2018 First Amendment lawsuit accusing a New York official of causing damage to the NRA’s relationships with banks and insurers.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a unanimous opinion that found the NRA “plausibly alleged” that Maria Vullo, a former superintendent of New York‘s Department of Financial Services, illegally retaliated against the pro-Second Amendment group after the Parkland, Florida, high school mass shooting that left 17 people dead.
The question before the justices was whether Vullo used her regulatory power to force state financial institutions to cut off ties with the NRA in violation of constitutional First Amendment protections.
Vullo, who worked in former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration, said her regulations targeted an insurance product that is illegal in New York, which is dubbed by critics as “murder insurance.” In essence, such insurances are third-party policies sold via the NRA that cover personal injury and criminal defense costs after the use of a firearm.
“Here, the NRA plausibly alleged that Vullo violated the First Amendment by coercing DFS-regulated entities into disassociating with the NRA in order to punish or suppress gun-promotion advocacy,” Sotomayor, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, wrote in her decision.
A mysterious shooting in North Carolina north of Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, not far from where some of America’s most elite U.S. Special Operations forces live and train is under investigation by the Army Criminal Investigation Division as well as local police. The shooting in Carthage, North Carolina occurred May 3 at 8:15 p.m. following a phone call about a suspected trespasser near a Special Forces soldier’s property.
Two Chechen men who spoke broken English were found near the soldier’s home. The family alleges the suspected intruder, 35-year-old Ramzan Daraev of Chicago was taking photos of their children. When confronted near a power line in a wooded part of the property, an altercation ensued and Daraev was shot several times at close range. A second man, Dzhankutov Adsalan, was in a vehicle some distance from the incident and was questioned by authorities and then released. The Moore County Sheriff’s office is leading the investigation.
The FBI told Fox News, “Our law enforcement partners at the Moore County Sheriff’s Office contacted the FBI after a shooting death in Carthage. A special agent met with investigators and provided a linguist to assist with a language barrier for interviews.”
A district judge has granted a pilot’s request for a class-action lawsuit against American Airlines for allegedly investing pension funds into environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds.
The case revolves around the allegation that American Airlines—headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas—violated its fiduciary obligation to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) “by investing millions of dollars of American Airlines employees’ retirement savings with investment managers and investment funds that pursue political agendas” through ESG initiatives.
“By pursuing ESG goals, Defendants gave Plan assets to fund managers, such as BlackRock, who allegedly ignored financial returns as the exclusive purpose and lowered the value of Plan participants’ investments,” the order states.
In addition to being disloyal to the employees, the plaintiff, Bryan Spence, argues that American Airlines’ investments were “imprudent because it is well known that ESG funds are associated with poor performance given the detrimental effects of such activism on stock prices.”
“To remedy these alleged ERISA violations, Plaintiff filed this lawsuit individually and on behalf of a proposed class of Plan participants and beneficiaries,” the order says. “ERISA authorized participants in a qualifying plan to bring an action on behalf of other participants to enforce the statute’s fiduciary obligations and remedial provisions, as well as recover all losses to a plan caused by a breach of a fiduciary duty.”
Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation into Stark Industries reveals it is being used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.
At least a dozen patriotic Russian hacking groups have been launching DDoS attacks since the start of the war at a variety of targets seen as opposed to Moscow. But by all accounts, few attacks from those gangs have come close to the amount of firepower wielded by a pro-Russia group calling itself “NoName057(16).”
As detailed by researchers at Radware, NoName has effectively gamified DDoS attacks, recruiting hacktivists via its Telegram channel and offering to pay people who agree to install a piece of software called DDoSia. That program allows NoName to commandeer the host computers and their Internet connections in coordinated DDoS campaigns, and DDoSia users with the most attacks can win cash prizes.
Microsoft’s announcement of the new AI-powered Windows 11 Recall feature has sparked a lot of concern, with many thinking that it has created massive privacy risks and a new attack vector that threat actors can exploit to steal data.
Revealed during a Monday AI event, the feature is designed to help “recall” information you have looked at in the past, making it easily accessible via a simple search.
While it’s currently only available on Copilot+ PCs running Snapdragon X ARM processors, Microsoft says they are working with Intel and AMD to create compatible CPUs.
Recall works by taking a screenshot of your active window every few seconds, recording everything you do in Windows for up to three months by default.
These snapshots will be analyzed by the on-device Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and an AI model to extract data from the screenshot. The data will be saved in a semantic index, allowing Windows users to browse through the snapshot history or search using human language queries.
Who wouldn’t want AI recording and monitoring their every move? Yet another reason never to turn on Windows Copilot+…or use a Windows machine at all.
Time for an update to this old classic
Though Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan survived by the skin of his teeth, a majority of Republican Texas House members say they won’t vote for him for speaker.
A majority of the 2025 Republican House caucus opposes Democratic committee chairs, and effectively will not support another term for Speaker Dade Phelan (R-Beaumont), the group said in a letter released on Friday.
“In a collective effort to respond to Republican voters and reform the Texas House, we will only vote for a candidate for speaker pursuant to the Platform and the Caucus By-Laws who will only appoint Republicans as committee chairs,” the brief letter and joint statement reads.
It adds, “The absence of a member’s or nominee’s name from this statement does not necessarily mean the individual is opposed to this statement. All members and nominees are invited to sign on to this statement.”
Forty six current or presumptive members signed the letter, including 23 members who voted for Phelan’s speakership last year.
One of those signatories, GOP nominee in House District 70 Steve Kinard, has a difficult general election fight against state Rep. Mihaela Plesa (D-Dallas) in a D-52% district.
The letter includes signatures from each of the 21 “Contract with Texas” signatories, most of whom campaigned specifically against Phelan’s speakership. That contract also includes a ban on Democratic committee chairs, though has 11 other planks to its demands as well.
Last session, a parliamentary maneuver precluded a vote on the question of banning Democratic chair appointments, though the idea had gained steam among GOP House members and was included in the party’s list of legislative priorities. It is likely to be featured again.
In a March interview after being pushed to a runoff and state Rep. Tom Oliverson (R-Cypress) announcing his challenge for the gavel, Phelan said he would not back down on the appointment of Democrats as committee chairs.
Snip.
This release makes Phelan’s path toward a third term as speaker much more difficult. Should this group hold, ostensibly opposed to Phelan, it will be impossible for him to win the Texas House Republican Caucus endorsement. However, the speaker could give in on some concessions, such as Democratic chair appointments, and win back this group’s support.
GOP caucus rules require members to vote for the body’s nominee, presumably enforced by the bylaws, though no section exists in that portion of the document laying out penalties for voting differently than the caucus has chosen. It’s happened before, for example last year when three members — state Reps. Tony Tinderholt (R-Arlington) and Nate Schatzline (R-Fort Worth), and now-former member Bryan Slaton (R-Royse City) — voted against the caucus nominee, Phelan, and for Tinderholt.
Article IX of the Texas Republican House Caucus bylaws lays out the procedure for selecting a speaker candidate. It requires the selection process to be conducted by secret ballot until a member receives two-thirds support from the body, currently 58 votes; if no candidate reaches that line, the last-placed candidate will be eliminated from the contest and that will be repeated until one candidate reaches 58.
Should the vote reach a third round, the threshold needed will drop to three-fifths support — currently at 52 votes. Should nobody reach that line, after a fourth round of voting, all nominations will be withdrawn and the floor reopened.
Depending on what happens in November with potential flips, those 58- and 52-lines may shift.
This intra-caucus vote will occur in early December, per the rules.
Libertarians nominate a social justice warrior Chase Oliver for their Presidential candidate. A fair number of Libertarians are saying they’ll vote for Trump now…
“I believe this is one of the most important elections of my lifetime, and I’m supporting Trump. I know that I’ll lose friends for this. Some will refuse to do business with me. The media will probably demonize me, as they have so many others before me. But despite this, I still believe it’s the right thing to do.”
The physics PhD said that he refuses to live in a society where people are afraid to speak their minds.
Red Lobster followup: Turns out Red Lobster is privately owned by seafood supplier Thai Union. And just who did Red Lobster buy all that “endless shrimp” from? No prizes for guessing…
“George Miller’s Furiosa is projected to take in only $31 million at the box office. When adjusted for inflation, that’s the worst Memorial Day box-office haul in 43 years.”
Will wokeness and the Biden recession kill off comic shops? Also, is Disney looking to outsource comics from Marvel?
World’s largest Buc-ee’s to open. “The new center is located in Luling, Texas, and will open its doors to the public the morning of June 10, according to a news release from the company. The new 75,000-square-foot center is symbolic for the Luling community, as it will replace the city’s current Buc-ee’s store, which was the first Buc-ee’s travel center built in 2003.” (Hat tip: Dave.)
“Donald Trump Found Guilty Of Being Donald Trump.” “‘It was an open and shut case,’ said prosecutor Joshua Steinglass. ‘There wasn’t any way he could sit there being Donald Trump and just get away with it. We were given strict orders to hold him accountable for being Donald Trump, and that’s what we’ve done.'”
: jonlajoiecomedy pic.twitter.com/OVFUVohhkY
