Samsung’s Texas fabs are evidently going to be the beneficiary of CHIPS Act subsidies.
The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) has announced that $6.4 billion will be sent to a Texas Samsung facility to bolster the supply chain of semiconductors.
The multi-billion dollar investment is part of a larger $40 billion dollar federal funding agreement as part of the CHIPS and Science Act.
As a White House press release states, the investment aims to “cement central Texas’s role as a state-of-the-art semiconductor ecosystem, creating at least 21,500 jobs and leveraging up to $40 million in CHIPS funding to train and develop the local workforce.”
This investment would be used at both the research and development facilities in Taylor and the expansion of the fabrication factory in Austin.
The Taylor facility isn’t just an R&D site, it’s a full-blown state-of-the-art fab, and they could start running the line as early as July. The chips Samsung will be producing are planned to be on their 4 nanometer node.
The City of Austin has previously identified semiconductor production as part of its Opportunity Austin economic expansion plan where the city sees itself as a “top global destination for businesses and investment.”
“We’re not just expanding production facilities; we’re strengthening the local semiconductor ecosystem and positioning the U.S. as a global semiconductor manufacturing destination,” said Kye Hyun Kyung, president and CEO of the Device Solutions (DS) Division at Samsung Electronics.
“To meet the expected surge in demand from U.S. customers, for future products like AI chips, our fabs will be equipped for cutting-edge process technologies and help advance the security of the U.S. semiconductor supply chain.”
As I’ve written before, semiconductor subsidies are the wrong solution for the wrong problem (especially if the Biden Administration demands Samsung pledge fealty to social justice before sucking the taxpayers teat). But if you are going to subsidize someone, and your goal is more cutting edge American fabs, then Samsung isn’t the worst recipient. Their fab tech is either second third best (depending on whether intel has actually gotten their act together or not) in the world behind TSMC, and 4nm is good enough for just about every fab customer in the world, save Apple (who is TSMC’s alpha customer), Intel (yes, Intel gets some of their cutting edge chips fabbed at TSMC), AMD, and a few others. Technical details here, assuming the difference between FinFET and GAAFET doesn’t make your eyes glaze over.
DEI — the identity-obsessed dogma that goes by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — has now trained Google’s new AI to refuse to draw white people. What’s even more alarming is that it’s also infected the supply chain that makes the chips powering everything from AI to missiles, endangering national security.
The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.
This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.
Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.
The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”
The department interprets that as license to diversify. Its factsheet asserts that diversity is “critical to strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem,” adding, “Critically, this must include significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”
The department does not call speed critical, even though the impetus for the CHIPS Act is that 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips are made in Taiwan, which China is preparing to annex by 2027, maybe even 2025.
Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.
That project is going better for Arizona than the actual chips part of the CHIPS Act. Because equity is so critical, the makers of humanity’s most complex technology must rely on local labor and apprentices from all those underrepresented groups, as TSMC discovered to its dismay.
Tired of delays at its first fab, the company flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.
Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.
Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.
To be fair, Intel has had fabs in Israel since since 1996, and Tower Semiconductor has had fabs in Israel since the 1980s. Poland, to the best of my knowledge, has never had a fab.
In short, the world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns in the CHIPS Act’s political games. They’ve quietly given up on America. Intel must know the coming grants are election-year stunts — mere statements of intent that will not be followed up. Even after due diligence and final agreements, the funds will only be released in dribs and drabs as recipients prove they’re jumping through the appropriate hoops.
So in the name of embedding the racist poison of social justice, the CHIPS Act, ostensibly designed to increase America’s share of cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing, is actually driving new fab construction out of America.
A newly discovered backdoor found in the xz liblzma library of XZ Utils, the XZ format compression utilities included in most Linux distributions, targets the RSA implementation of OpenSSH.
For those outside of tech, that sentence was an unreadable jumble of acronyms. For those inside tech, a chill probably ran down their spine, as those technologies are everywhere. Anytime anyone buys something online, they’re going to be using SSH to create a secure channel to pass transaction information. [As a commenter noted, SSH is a command tool rather than Secure Socket Layer (SSL), which is used for encrypted transactions. Mental typo. My bad. – LP.] Depending on how many distros are using that library, the consequence range from “bad” to “really, really bad.”
A vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) in XZ Utils, the XZ format compression utilities included in most Linux distributions, may “enable a malicious actor to break sshd authentication and gain unauthorized access to the entire system remotely,” Red Hat warns.
The cause of the vulnerability is actually malicious code present in versions 5.6.0 (released in late February) and 5.6.1 (released on March 9) of the xz libraries, which was accidentally found by Andres Freund, a PostgreSQL developer and software engineer at Microsoft.
“After observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz package) on Debian sid installations over the last weeks (logins with ssh taking a lot of CPU, valgrind errors) I figured out the answer: The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored,” he shared via the oss-security mailing list.
According to Red Hat, the malicious injection in the vulnerable versions of the libraries is obfuscated and only included in full in the download package.
“The Git distribution lacks the M4 macro that triggers the build of the malicious code. The second-stage artifacts are present in the Git repository for the injection during the build time, in case the malicious M4 macro is present,” they added.
“The resulting malicious build interferes with authentication in sshd via systemd.”
I’m just going to note for the record that a whole lot of longtime Linux programmers absolutely hated the introduction of systemd. I don’t have deep enough Linux chops to take a side in this controversy, or know whether systemd was a significant factor in allowing the exploit to work.
Moving on:
The malicious script in the tarballs is obfuscated, as are the files containing the bulk of the exploit, so this is likely no accident.
“Given the activity over several weeks, the committer is either directly involved or there was some quite severe compromise of their system. Unfortunately the latter looks like the less likely explanation, given they communicated on various lists about the “fixes” [for errors caused by the injected code in v5.6.0],” Freund commented.
One silver lining is that the problem doesn’t look to be as widespread as it could be.
“Luckily xz 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 have not yet widely been integrated by Linux distributions, and where they have, mostly in pre-release versions.”
Red Hat says that the vulnerable packages are present in Fedora 41 and Fedora Rawhide, and have urged users of those distros to immediately stop using them.
“If you are using an affected distribution in a business setting, we encourage you to contact your information security team for next steps,” they said, and added that no versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are affected.
Since Red Hat is usually the default for big E-commerce platforms, it looks like this exploit is merely “bad” rather than “really, really bad,” which means its not nearly as bad as, say, Log4J was. Your Amazons and eBays are probably safe from the exploit.
The people who are likely going to be hurt by this exploit are mom and pop E-commerce sites using their webhost’s “build an E-commerce site using these easy tools” feature. The smaller the site, the more likely they’re using a free distro, some of which may have this vulnerability.
Whatever the site, they should run an updated software composition analysis tool on stacks and build-chains to see if they’re vulnerable.
At the request of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook officials developed a program called In-App Action Panel (IAAP) that they deployed in 2016 and which was in use through mid-2019, according to the documents, which include internal emails.
The program utilized cyberattacks to intercept information from Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon. The program then decrypted the information.
“Facebook’s IAAP Program used nation-state-level hacking technology developed by the company’s Onavo team, in which Facebook paid contractors (including teens) to designate Facebook a trusted ‘root’ certificate authority on their mobile devices, then generated fake digital certificates to redirect secure Snapchat analytics traffic (and later, analytics from YouTube and Amazon) from Snapchat’s servers to Onavo’s; decrypted these analytics and used them for competitive gain, including to inform Facebook’s product strategy; reencrypted them; and sent them up to Snapchat’s servers as though it came straight from Snapchat’s app, with Facebook’s Social Advertising competitor none the wiser,” lawyers said in one of the documents.
This is a clever attack in several ways. If you can create and get a program/device to accept a false signing certificate, you bypass having to break a company’s encryption altogether. The program trusts your fake certificate and creates a secure connection to your backend, using your encryption, thinking it’s transmitting information back to the targeted company. Also, analytics data doesn’t have to be sent and received in real time, so a significant delay in gather and receive times may not tip off the targeted company to the attack.
None of this is a walk in the park, but it’s something like ten orders of magnitude easier than breaking the targeted company’s encryption stream on a live session to seamlessly hack it in real time, which is the sort of God-level hacking limited to those with NSA-level computing power, or fictional characters.
The lawyers, representing plaintiffs in a lawsuit that accuses Facebook of anti-competitive behavior, were describing emails they obtained through discovery.
In one email, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote that there was a need to receive information about Snapchat but that their traffic was encrypted. “Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this,” he wrote.
After Facebook employees started working on figuring it out, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan wrote that the program could pay users to “let us install a really heavy piece of software (that could even do man in the middle, etc.).”
Man in the middle refers to a type of cyberattack where attackers secretly intercept information.
More specifically, it’s where a third party successfully inserts itself into the communication stream between two other parties, relaying (and possibly altering) both ends of the communication without either party knowing.
“We are going to figure out a plan for a lockdown effort during June to bring a step change to our Snapchat visibility. This is an opportunity for our team to shine,” Guy Rosen, founder of Onavo, later wrote. Onavo was started in Israel and bought by Facebook in 2013.
In a presentation on the program when it was being finalized, it was stated that there would be “’kits” that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage.”
Documents and testimony obtained in the case showed the program was launched in June 2016 and continued being used through 2019.
The program initially targeted Snapchat but was later expanded to Google’s YouTube and Amazon, according to the documents.
A few quick points:
This is all from Snapchat’s court documents, so you have to put an “allegedly” on all this.
That Zuckerberg himself is (allegedly) directly implicated in deliberately breaking federal law is pretty breathtaking. He could be looking at serious jail time. Or would be, if he weren’t such a big Democratic Party Donor. (We’ll see how much time Sam Bankman-Fried catches today.)
Snapchat is one thing, but targeting fellow tech behemoths Google (which owns YouTube) and Amazon with this sort of attack would seem to be…unwise. (Maybe Google’s forgiveness was covered in the secret deal the two companies allegedly signed with each other.)
The timeframe is important here. Back in 2016-2019, the handling of digital signing certificates was a lot more loosey-goosey than it is now. A whole lot of things have been tightened up. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to carry out such an attack now, but it would be harder.
We’ll see if the whole thing jumps from litigation land to the feds actually going after Facebook, but at a time when Facebook is being sued by all manner of plaintiffs (including Texas and other state attorney generals) over privacy violations and anti-competitive practices, the Snapchat revelations could certainly provide more fuel for the fire…
Here’s a rant from Charles White, AKA Cr1TiKaL, AKA penguinz0, about the pain of using the web without an ad-blocker.
I have dialed in my ad-blocker so that the only time I see the damn things is when using my iPhone, when they make some sites unusable.
“There’s a few things that everyone knows human beings can’t live without water, air, a nice smile. But there’s actually something that’s often overlooked that’s a necessity for life on this planet, and it’s an ad blocker when using the worldwide web.”
He made the mistake of turning off adblock to look at something…and unleashed an unspeakable horror!
“It’s just a massive headache, just this visual nuisance, all this clutter with an inundation of ads that seems like it’s some kind of scene from a 90s movie where you get hacked, where it just has, like, ‘Virus Detected!'”
“If you try and watch a video on some of these mainstream media sites, you get an ad every 2 or 3 seconds, and I’m not exaggerating. I don’t mean you get a banner ad, I mean you get a full 20 to 30 second video ad that pauses your video to play that ad. So a 2-minute video that I was trying to watch about a bobblehead heist ended up taking over 10 minutes, and I still didn’t even finish the video.”
“It is absurd, it’s unusable.”
“I would argue it’s like a basic human right at this point to have an ad blocker when using the internet. It is that fucking atrocious.”
He then demonstrates, and it’s every bit as horrifying as described. “This can’t be legal.”
He mentions YouTube’s war on ad-blockers, which I seem to have defeated with a combination of scripts.
Which sites do you particularly find unusable without adblock?
Because the ground invasion wasn’t enough, the Biden Administration has been flying illegal aliens into American cities, wages for Americans are down, San Francisco continues inching toward sanity, some crime news, and Fisker looks farked. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has revealed that the Biden administration has flown at least 320,000 migrants into the United States in an effort to reduce the number of crossings at the southern border, according to Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“The program at the center of the FOIA litigation is perhaps the most enigmatic and least-known of the Biden administration’s uses of the CBP One cellphone scheduling app, even though it is responsible for almost invisibly importing by air 320,000 aliens with no legal right to enter the United States since it got underway in late 2022,” wrote Bensman.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had initially refused to disclose information about the flights, which use a cell phone app, CBP One, to arrange.
“Under these legally dubious parole programs, aliens who cannot legally enter the country use the CBP One app to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those airports. The parole program allows for two-year periods of legal status during which adults are eligible for work authorization,” Bensman continues.
The flights resulted in illegal immigrants being placed in at least 43 American cities from January through December 2023.
Under the terms of their release, migrants are able to remain in the US for two years without obtaining legal status, and are meanwhile eligible for work authorization.
How many Americans realized they were voting for this invasion when they voted for Biden?
A new witness could testify Fani Willis warned lover Nathan Wade’s former business partner to stay quiet about their affair, an explosive new court filing claims.
“They are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us,” Willis is alleged to have warned Terrence Bradley in a September 2023 phone call.
The call was overheard by Cobb County, Georgia, prosecutor Cindi Lee Yeager, according to court papers filed Monday by Trump co-defendant David Schafer.
The tide continues to turn in San Francisco. “‘Progressivism Is Out’: San Franciscans Pass Ballot Measures Requiring Drug Testing for Welfare, Expanding Police Surveillance.”
San Francisco voters who’ve grown tired of the crime, homelessness, and drug use plaguing their left-wing city overwhelmingly approved a pair of ballot measures on Tuesday that will expand police powers and require welfare recipients to be screened for drugs.
Proposition E, which authorizes police to use surveillance equipment — cameras, drones, and even facial-recognition technology — without prior permission from an oversight body, passed with 59,818 votes, or 59.9 percent. The proposition will also loosen restrictions on police chases and require that officers spend less time on paperwork and administrative duties.
Proposition F, which mandates that anyone receiving public-assistance benefits be screened for a substance-abuse disorder, passed with 63,295 votes, or 63 percent.
As part of the proposition, public-assistance recipients found to be drug-dependent could be offered treatment. If it is made “available at no cost, the recipient will be required to participate to continue receiving” public benefits, according to the proposition.
“Progressivism is out—for now,” the San Francisco Chronicles’ website read in bold letters on Wednesday morning, “Voters make it clear: S.F. can no longer be called a progressive city.”
The approval of both propositions was a big win for San Francisco’s embattled mayor, London Breed, who placed both measures on the primary ballot in an effort to tamp down on crime and to take aim at drug addiction and overdose deaths in the city. She told reporters on Tuesday that passage of the two measure will allow her administration to “continue the work we’re doing” to improve public safety, according to the Chronicle.
With San Francisco turning slightly sane, Austin may vie with Seattle, New York and Chicago for the title of America’s Most Insane Radical Leftwing City.
In June 2023, The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas reported that the Indian Health Service (IHS), which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, is collaborating with the ACLU, Demos, and several other left-wing organizations to register new voters. In order to expand the reach of these efforts, the Biden administration designated an Arizona-based Indian Health Service (IHS) facility as an official voter registration hub in October.
According to Arizona Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Native Health of Phoenix, which caters to “urban Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and all other individuals,” will “assist individuals in the voter registration process.” The administration confirmed that the IHS facility would be one of five designated as voter registration sites by the end of 2023.
Much like young voters, Native Americans heavily favor Democrats.
4. Department of Agriculture
The USDA is another federal agency directing its efforts at potential Democrat voters. Earlier this month, emails obtained by The Daily Signal show the agency was colluding with Demos as early as August 2021 to work on turning out voters.
As The Federalist’s M.D. Kittle reported, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service “encourages all state agencies administering the child nutrition programs to provide local program operators with promotional materials, including voter registration and non-partisan, non-campaign election information, to disseminate among voting-age program participants and their families.”
One of the “ideas” recommended by the agency is for “[s]chool food authorities administering the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in high schools, and adult day care centers and emergency shelters participating in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) to promote voter registration and election information among voting-age participants and use congregate feeding areas, such as cafeterias, or food distribution sites, as sites for the dissemination of information.”
Sweden officially became part of the NATO alliance Thursday, two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused the nation to overhaul its non-alignment policy.
Snip.
“It’s official – #Sweden is now the 32nd member of #NATO, taking its rightful place at our table. Sweden’s accession makes NATO stronger, Sweden safer, and the whole Alliance more secure. I look forward to raising their flag at NATO HQ on Monday,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on X Thursday. Hungary ratified Sweden’s ascension into the alliance last week, becoming the final NATO country to do so.
The nordic country applied for NATO membership in May 2022, about three months after Russia began its war in Ukraine. The admission of Finland and Sweden expands NATO to 32 members.
As Peter Zeihan noted, “in the Swedish military, every day you wake up, you prepare for one thing: the war with the Russians.” Good job, Putin!
Blaze Media journalist Steve Baker was arrested by the FBI and brought to a Texas federal courtroom in handcuffs, a belly chain and foot shackles to face four nonviolent misdemeanor charges for being at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021…
“There’s nothing in there about my behavior,” Mr. Baker told The Epoch Times. “It’s all about my words. Everything. It’s all about stuff I said before, stuff I said after, and that’s it. No more complicated than that.”
Mr. Geyer said his client’s arrest shows an “unprecedented shift in Department of Justice policy [after it] had spent decades adhering to special protections for journalists.”
Speaking of people who shouldn’t be getting taxpayers subsidies, Harvard “We Hate Jews” University wants $2 billion in taxpayer-backed bonds.
Recall effort against Dallas’ Democrat-turned-Republican mayor Eric Johnson fails. Number of signatures to have a recall election: 103,595. Number of signatures submitted: Zero.
Congratulations on surviving the first 1/6th of 2024! The Big Guy is exactly who we knew he was all along, Houston police screw up, some big crime stories, Wayne LaPierre is found guilty, and the world’s saddest Oompa Loompa. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Remember when Joe Biden told the American people that his son didn’t make money in China?” asked Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) in a video posted to X. ““Well, not only did he lie about his son Hunter making money in China, but it also turns out that $40,000 in laundered China money landed in Joe Biden’s bank account in the form of a personal check.”
Today, a U.S. District Court issued its final judgment in Texas v. Garland, which was a challenge to the U.S. House’s proxy voting rule under the Quorum Clause of the Constitution. In its final judgment, the Court concluded that U.S. House members must be physically present for their vote to comply with the Constitution’s Quorum Clause. Attorneys from the Texas Public Policy Foundation argued the merits at trial in January of this year.
The lawsuit was originally filed with the State of Texas in response to Congress’ unlawful passage of the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill in December 2022. The U.S. Constitution requires a quorum, or a majority, of House members to be physically present for the U.S. House of Representatives to conduct business. As less than half of the members were present when the legislation was passed, with the rest voting by proxy, this legislation never should have passed, and the president should not have signed it.
“This meticulous, 120-page opinion was written after a full trial on the merits,” said TPPF senior attorney Matt Miller. “The Court correctly concluded that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 violated the Quorum Clause of the U.S. Constitution because a majority of House members was not physically present when the $1.7 trillion spending bill was passed. Proxy voting is unconstitutional.”
This basically says that every bit of that $1.7 trillion spending was unconstitutional, along with any laws, etc. passed in that omnibus. Just how do you back out all that money that’s been spent, assuming this is upheld?
Record meth bust in Eagle Pass. “The U.S. Customs and Border Protections (CBP) have seized six and a half tons of methamphetamine, over 13,000 pounds, at the Eagle Pass Port of Entry, making it the largest ever seizure in a single enforcement action.”
Mitch McConnell announced on Wednesday that he will step down as the Senate Republican leader in November, ending his tenure as the longest-serving Senate leader in history.
“This will be my last term as Republican Leader of the Senate,” the 82-year-old veteran of the chamber said to his colleagues on the Senate floor. “I’m not going anywhere… It’s time for the next generation of leadership.”
He’ll leave the senate when his term ends in 2027. You can condemn him as the ultimate swamp creature, or praise him for his effectiveness at things like getting Trump’s Supreme Court picks confirmed. It’s two sides of the same coin. I’m not sure he was as effective as Trent Lott or Howard Baker.
Houston Police Department Chief Troy Finner called it a “dark day” at a press conference for the Houston Police Department, announcing that 4,107 adult sexual assault cases were wrongly closed without investigation.
A case management code “suspended for lack of personnel” was used, which led to closing the cases without actually investigating them.
Finner said he was first made aware the code even existed in 2021 and instructed HPD’s special victims division to stop using the code; however, he found out on February 7, 2024 that it continued. HPD first began using the code in 2016.
He said he immediately ordered a review of all cases suspended using this code dating back to 2016, which will take at least 30 days to complete. While the number of cases they have today is 4,017, he says it is “fluid and subject to change.”
60 Minutes gets to enjoy some of that vibrant Muslim diversity in Sweden to the sides of their faces.
60 Minutes goes to Sweden to make a heart warming special about diversity, but see a different situation, then this happens. pic.twitter.com/oUd2ZuJ0RV
“After five days of deliberations, a jury in New York on Friday held the National Rifle Association liable for financial mismanagement and found that Wayne LaPierre, the group’s former CEO, corruptly ran the nation’s most prominent gun rights group. The jury determined that LaPierre’s violation of his duties cost the NRA $5,400,000, though he already repaid roughly $1.5 million to the organization.” Here’s the thing: While they prosecution was unquestionably politically motivated, LaPierre did run a crooked ship. In the long run, forcing Wayne and his corrupt cronies from office has done the NRA a huge favor.
Argentine President Javier Milei just ended his country’s budget deficit in nine weeks. If Trump and the Republicans manage to control both houses of congress next year, there’s no reason they can’t balance the budget…assuming they have the will.
“Austin Fire Department Chaplain Dismissed for Comments on Transgender Athletes Sues for Free Speech Violation. A chaplain for the Austin Fire Department was dismissed from his position after expressing beliefs on his personal blog about protecting women’s sports.”
After a volunteer chaplain of the Austin Fire Department (AFD) was fired for posting on his personal blog that men and women are biologically different and should not compete against each other in sports, a lawsuit was filed in an effort to protect his rights to free speech and religious freedom.
The Alliance Defending Freedom said in a press release that it filed a motion Tuesday on behalf of Dr. Andrew Fox, who served in a voluntary capacity as chaplain for AFD before he was dismissed in 2021.
Unlike APD, AFD public and union leadership has been infected by social justice. Dr. Fox appears to have a very strong case on viewpoint discrimination grounds.
White TV host tries to race-bait Jerry Seinfeld for hosting “mostly” white male comedians on his show. It doesn’t go well for him.
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bipartisan bill into law authorizing the release of grand jury transcripts from an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. The new legislation, signed by the Florida governor on Thursday, will allow a public release of the jury’s transcripts from the 2006 probe into Epstein’s abuse of underage girls. The new measure goes into effect July 1.”
Weird Austin crime story: “Prominent local businessman arrested in Austin, accused of arson.”
A prominent Austin businessman and founder of Continental Automotive Group, or CAG, was arrested Thursday on charges of Felony Arson and a State Jail Felony offense of Burglary.
Dorsey Bryan Hardeman, 75, is accused of starting a fire at a downtown Austin building on Sunday, according to an arrest affidavit.
According to Travis County court records, Trey Collins with the Minton, Bassett, Flores & Carsey firm has been retained as the attorney representing Hardeman. Sam Bassett told KXAN the office has just begun its work and “it is premature to comment. However, we will provide Mr. Hardeman an appropriate and vigorous defense.”
The affidavit said the Austin Fire Department responded to a building fire at the former Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop on 400 Nueces St. on Feb. 25.
Once the fire was contained, fire investigators determined the incident to be incendiary and found metal shavings on the ground below the door suggesting the door lock had been drilled out, records state.
The affidavit states fire investigators watched video surveillance from the building, which showed an older man entering the building with a red container consistent with a plastic gas tank.
Multiple cameras inside the building show a man pouring liquid from the red container and dropping multiple matches on the ground, the affidavit said.
Records show the man arrived at the location in a white 4-door Mercedez SUV.
Investigators interviewed the owner of Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop who told AFD Hardeman was the owner of the property next door and had previously asked about purchasing the property at 400 Nueces St.
This is not what people refer to as “the perfect crime.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Remember Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me? It turns out McDonalds didn’t destroy his liver, a decade of alcoholism did.
More Biden corruption evidence, a would-be mass shooter turns out to be a pro-Palestinian Bernie Sis, a parent beats the snot out of a would-be child kidnapper, a top sniper dies, Disney gets sued, and Venus is feeling Zoove. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Another “Try to contain your shock” headline: “Joe Biden’s Classified Docs Provide More Evidence Hunter’s Pay-To-Play Was A Family Affair.”
The special counsel report on Joe Biden’s unauthorized removal and disclosure of classified documents exposed much more than our president’s mental deficits and the breadth of his irresponsible handling of top-secret and classified information. The report revealed a close nexus between Hunter Biden’s influence peddling and his father’s responsibilities and access to intel during the elder’s term as vice president.
On Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur released the results of his investigation into the president stemming from the discovery of top-secret and classified documents at Biden’s D.C.-based Penn Biden Center, his private Delaware home, and the University of Delaware. While the specific details in the recovered documents remain unknown, the nearly 400-page report provided an extensive enough summary of the materials to confirm an overlap in the timing and topics of Joe Biden’s vice presidency and Hunter Biden’s “business” enterprises.
Ukraine Overlap
Appendix A of the report provided a table summary of the documents recovered. Many of the top-secret and classified documents concerned Ukraine during the time frame when Hunter Biden acted as an intermediary between Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and the vice president. Recall that Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee that in early March 2014, he met Zlochevsky while in Moscow. And soon after, he and Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, receiving $83,000 per month.
The following month, Hunter Biden sent Archer an email dated April 13, 2014 — one week before Joe Biden would travel to Ukraine and meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Referring to “my guys upcoming travels,” Hunter then elaborated on “22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s ‘destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk,’” according to the New York Post.
Among the material recovered from President Biden’s unauthorized storage locales were several top-secret and otherwise classified or confidential documents discussing Ukraine. One undated document discussed issues related to Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Another, dated Sept. 17, 2014, consisted of a “Memorandum for the Vice President from staff members, with subject ‘U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine.’” Also dated Sept. 17, 2014, was an “event memo” from a vice-presidential national security staffer, titled, “Lunch with Ukrainian President Poroshenko,” which was scheduled for the following day.
The overlap between Joe Biden’s Ukraine-related work and Hunter Biden’s Burisma profiteering became more pronounced in 2015. On Dec. 2, 2015, the lobbying firm Blue Star Group, which Hunter Biden had arranged to work with Burisma, wrote to Burisma that it had “participated in a conference call today with senior Obama Administration officials ahead of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine next week.” The memorandum provided a summary of the conference call, telling Burisma that “Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden’s Special Advisor for Europe and Russia, and Dr. Colin Kahl, the Vice President’s National Security Advisor, presented the agenda for the trip and answered questions about current U.S. policy toward Ukraine.”
Two days after receiving this memorandum, Burisma executives Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharskyi, on Dec. 4, 2015, pushed Hunter Biden to call his father. The Burisma executives, according to Archer, expressed concern over the pressure they were under from Ukrainian investigators.
And there’s more, though very little that will be surprising to BattleSwarm readers. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Joe Biden met with the chairman of the Chinese energy firm CEFC shortly after Hunter Biden’s business associate Rob Walker received a $3 million payment from the firm as part of a joint venture the pair were then trying to develop, according to a newly released transcript of Walker’s closed-door congressional testimony.
Walker testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on January 26 about his role in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC.
Walker received roughly $3 million from CEFC in March 2017 through its State Energy HK account, bank records show. He recalled a meeting between Joe Biden and CEFC officials in spring 2017, around the time of the State Energy HK payment.
“Did Joe Biden ever attend any location or meeting or place where CEFC officials were also there?” a staffer asked Walker, according to a transcript of the interview released Tuesday morning.
“Yes,” Walker replied. He recalled the meeting took place in Washington, D.C., and Joe Biden, who had just left office as vice president, stopped by for lunch.
“I don’t know the exact — it was 20- probably -17 at some point, but I don’t know exactly when,” Walker said.
The meeting took place at a Four Seasons hotel in a private room. CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming and other associates were present at the meeting.
“I don’t know if Zang was there, but I believe that Ye was there. I’m certain of it,” Walker testified.
He did not know who the other CEFC associates were at the meeting. Walker firmly recalled Jianming and his translator, Hunter Biden, business associate James Gilliar, and Joe Biden attending the meeting.
Well, what do you know? “Mail-In Ballot Fraud Study Finds Trump ‘Almost Certainly’ Won In 2020.”
A new study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election concludes that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail.
The Heartland Institute study tried to gauge the probable impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots cast for both then-candidate Joe Biden and his opponent, President Donald Trump, would have had on the overall 2020 election results.
The study was based on data obtained from a Heartland/Rasmussen survey in December that revealed that roughly one in five mail-in voters admitted to potentially fraudulent actions in the presidential election.
After the researchers carried out additional analyses of the data, they concluded that mail-in ballot fraud “significantly” impacted the 2020 presidential election.
They also found that, absent the huge expansion of mail-in ballots during the pandemic, which was often done without legislative approval, President Trump would most likely have won.
“Had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected,” the report’s authors wrote.
Not news to those of us who watched returns into the wee hours, only to wake up to The Steal the next morning.
Ukraine bags another Russian ship. “Ukrainian Magura V5 Marine Drones have sunk the Ropucha-class landing ship Cesar Kunikov near Alupka in Crimea in the Black Sea.”
Putin says he prefers Biden to Trump in the White House because he’s more predictable. I’m sure he does. Notice that both his Ukraine invasions occurred during Democratic presidential administrations.
The woman who tried to shoot up Lakewood Church in Houston was a Bernie Sis who had “Free Palestine” written on her AR-15. “[Genesse I.] Moreno had a violent, extensive criminal history stretching back to 2005, according to court records reviewed by Townhall. She was previously arrested for assaulting a public servant, assault causing bodily injury, forgery, theft for stealing cosmetics from a store, evading police, and unlawfully carrying a weapon, among a slew of charges on Moreno’s decades-old rap sheet.”
Alan Winston Filion, 17, is suspected of targeting hundreds of high schools, mosques, historically Black churches, US senators and even the US Supreme Court with swatting attacks that placed thousands of people in the crosshairs of heavily armed police response teams.
Prosecutors say the 6ft 3in teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response”, and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.
Mr Filion would then post chilling audio of the 911 calls on Telegram as a proof of purchase, according to court documents.
Among the hundreds of “swats” that Torswats allegedly claimed credit for were multiple hoax callouts at the home of Patrick S. Tomlinson, a Milwaukee-based science fiction author who says he has been swatted dozens of times in the past four years as part of a targeted harassment campaign by a group of “sociopathic” stalkers.
You’d think after five or six times, the guy would put up a sign in his front yard alerting police to the problem. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Court Orders Netherlands To Halt F-35 Parts For Israel As EU Says “Too Many People” Are Dying.” Excuse me? Does the Netherlands let their court interfere in foreign policy decisions and defense contracts based on events beyond their borders?
The US Army is cancelling its next generation Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, service officials announced today, taking a potential multi-billion-dollar contract off the table and throwing the service’s long-term aviation plans into doubt.
In addition, the Army plans to end production on the UH-60 V Black Hawk in fiscal 2025, due to “significant cost growth,” keep General Electric’s Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP) in the development phase instead of moving it into production, and phase the Shadow and Raven unmanned aerial systems out of the fleet, the service added.
All told, it reflects a massive shift in the Army’s aviation strategy and upends years of planning. There is also an ironic sense of history repeating: the decision to end FARA comes two decades to the month after the Army ended its plans to procure the RAH-66 Comanche and nearly 16 years after it terminated work on the ARH-70A Arapaho, both aircraft designed to replace the Kiowa — the same helicopter FARA was supposed to, finally, replace.
The reason for ending FARA, Army leaders told a small group of reporters ahead of the announcement, is a reflection of what war looks like in the modern era.
“We absolutely are paying attention [to world events] and adjusting, because we could go to war tonight, this weekend,” head of Army Futures Command Gen. James Rainey told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday.
“We are learning from the battlefield — especially Ukraine — that aerial reconnaissance has fundamentally changed,” Army Chief Gen. Randy George said in a press release. “Sensors and weapons mounted on a variety of unmanned systems and in space are more ubiquitous, further reaching and more inexpensive than ever before.”
Many commenters here feared the Pentagon wasn’t taking the drone threat seriously. Maybe they are…
The Marine Corps’ all-time deadliest sniper, Chuck Mawhinney, has died at age 75.
From 1968 to 1969, Mawhinney — still only a teenager — was credited with 103 confirmed kills.
An additional 216 kills were listed as “probable” since the enemies’ bodies were risky to verify in the active war zone.
Mawhinney had confirmed kills over 1,000 yards, with the average kill shot for snipers during the Vietnam War taken at a distance of 300 to 800 yards.
He received a Bronze Star with Combat Valor, Navy Achievement Medal, Navy Commendation Medal with Combat Valor, and two Purple Hearts.
Having more confirmed kills than Carlos Hathcock is pretty impressive. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The CW Network (which evidently still exists) just launched a 12 channel free streaming platform. Including, evidently, a Mystery Science Theater 3000 channel.
The quote I was looking for was “My own grandmother fought the Indians for sixty years… then choked to death on lemon pie” from the original 3:10 to Yuma. I remembered the general shape of the quote, and that it was from a western, but not the exact quote, and not the type of pie.
So I went to Google. Here’s the search string I entered, in all it’s typoed glory: “fought the Indians for 20 years and choked to deth on cream pie.”
This is the first result that came up:
Why is Google selling adword placement for snuff films? Remember all the way back when their logo was “don’t be evil?”
Seems like they’re fine being plenty evil.
That’s not the only shocking thing in those results. Here are some more:
Clearly something has gone deeply wrong at Google.
After I post this, I’m going to write Ken Paxton and Ted Cruz for their respective inquiries into Google. I think they might be interested…
The Biden recession and other trends made 2023 a horrible year for startups.
“Big startups are shutting down. According to PitchBook, more than 3,000 private venture backed startups failed in the last year.”
“Of the startups raising money, 19% were funded at a lower valuation than in prior funding rounds.”
“38% of VCs disappeared from dealmaking last year and more than a quarter of a million workers at tech companies were laid off over the same period.”
“US corporate bankruptcy filings closed out 2023 with the most filings since 2010. The year has been described as a mass extinction event for startups in the press.”
Some of the startup failures Boyle namechecks (Hyperloop, Bird) seemed like stupid ideas from the git-go. “Bird the electric scooter rental company—which was also supposed to reinvent public transportation—filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was the fastest startup to ever land a billion-dollar valuation, and at its peak was worth two and a half billion dollars. It was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in September after failing to maintain a market cap of above $15 million dollars for 30 consecutive days.”
“Who would have thought that renting scooters to drunk people for a dollar (who would then throw them in a canal on their way home) would be a money losing business? Bird ran up more than $1.6bn in net losses since 2018 before finally running out of money.”
Smile Direct Club: $8.9 billion valuation at 2019 IPO. “The stock fell in value over time as the company proved to be unprofitable year after year. The company shut down last month $900 million dollars in debt.”
One I never heard of: “The health tech startup Olive AI which reached a peak valuation of $4 billion dollars in 2020 driven by the need for automation in healthcare during the pandemic. The company raised over 900 million dollars from investors. In 2022 the company began laying off staff citing ‘tough economic conditions.’ The company was allegedly trying to raise money when it abruptly shut down in November. Going out of business in 2023 was particularly surprising for a company with AI in its name.” Indeed, AI seems to be the current space where stupid money goes to die.
Another one I never heard of: Zume.
No.
“Zume – the robot pizza delivery company which had raised $445 million dollars in VC funding, the majority of which came from SoftBank in 2018 at a two and a quarter billion-dollar valuation, shut down this summer.” Stupid, but at least I can see why California companies would invest heavily in food automation with that $16 (and rising) minimum wage.
WeWork “set out to revolutionize office real estate – by having an app – which I’m told didn’t work very well, and free beer on tap filed for bankruptcy in November.” I’ve covered WeWork previously.
“WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann were the poster boys of how a blitzscaled business model led by a charismatic founder could apply a veneer of technology to an old business idea and attract venture capital funding to achieve a multibillion dollar valuation.”
“At its peak, WeWork was valued in private markets at $47 billion dollars. Softbank alone invested 16 billion dollars into the company. Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder, allegedly invested his first $4.4 billion dollars in the shared office space company after Neumann gave him a 12-minute tour of a WeWork in 2016. With such a short tour, it’s unlikely that the free beer even had an impact.”
“Softbank – run by Masayoshi Son (Japan’s Cathie Wood) was one of the biggest startup investors in the last decade. They invested in all sorts of non tech companies that were made to look like tech in order to attain a sky-high valuation. According to Bloomberg, the SoftBank Vision Fund alone lost $53 billion dollars over the last two years on startup investments.”
“We have seen a very difficult period for startups over the last year or two, but it comes in the wake of probably the best period for VC backed startups in decades. During the decade from 2011 to 2021 VC investment in private start-ups grew more than sevenfold, from 46 billion dollars in 2011 to $345 billion dollars in 2021.”
“In 2022 when the federal reserve began hiking interest rates, this money began drying up as investors lost their taste for unprofitable, but high growth, investments.”
That investment boom was driven by two things: Low interest rates and “a recent history of profitable exits from VC funded startups like Facebook, Google, Whatsapp and Snap meant that investors were suddenly paying a lot of attention to tech startups – hoping to repeat those successes.”
“Venture capital went from being a small asset class run out of offices on Sand Hill Road that had burned investors in the dot com bubble to a massive global asset class like hedge funds or private equity.”
The Flu Manchu lockdowns brought investment from “‘working from home’ companies like Zoom and Peloton.” I always thought of Peloton as a lifestyle luxury brand.
“People were using apps like Uber and DoorDash for food delivery, and booking rentals on Airbnb to get out of big cities now that they no longer had to turn up in the office.”
“While the prior wave of profitable high growth tech stocks had been (one way or another) in the advertising space, or in businesses like cloud computing, the new wave of startups had untested business models—gig economy businesses which attracted a lot of competition and might never flip to profitability—or robot-made pizza which would be cooked on route to a customer’s home.”
“A lot of the VC’s possibly believed in many of the questionable investments that have since gone bust, but a venture capital fund isn’t really there to hold on to these investments until the underlying business flips to profitability. They invest at the idea stage with the goal of selling these businesses on to the public when the hype is at its peak.”
“They did manage to unload a number of the biggest flops like WeWork – but not at the valuations they were hoping for, and have found themselves holding the bag on a lot of investments that they bought into at peak valuation.”
“The huge valuations many of these companies were attaining in the private market may have been more of a function of how much money had flowed into the private tech startup market since 2011 rather than necessarily reflecting the quality of these companies and their business models.”
“According to Erin Griffith at The New York Times, $27.2 billion dollars in VC funding had gone into the 3,200 venture-backed companies that went out of business in the first 11 months of 2023.” And that’s just the firms trackable on PitchBook. The true total is almost certainly higher.
“That 27.2 billion dollar number excluded many of the largest startup failures that went public, like WeWork, or that found buyers at much lower prices than VC investors had invested at.”
“The hype around AI that we have seen in the last year has masked a lot of the losses in the tech space.”
“Meta was up 178 percent last year due to a combination of AI hype and cost cutting within their core business. This covers up the 46.5 billion dollars lost on the Metaverse – which no one will venture into, for fear that they run into Mark Zuckerberg.” I strongly suspect that a lot of those VR losses are actually money siphoned off for something else.
Despite this, stocks like Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia have hit all-time highs.
“One of the negative economic effects of startup shutdowns is that in such an environment it becomes harder for founders with good business ideas to get funding.”
“According to PitchBook, the number of active investors in US Venture Capital, which was defined as firms that made two or more deals in the last year, plummeted by 38% in the first three quarters of 2023 compared to the same period the prior year.”
Many of the startup failures were zombie companies, those that should have failed earlier but were kept alive by VC money and low interest rates.
“No one wants to see firms going out of business, especially startups which are often the most exciting and innovative firms, but if a business model makes no sense, or only works in a zero-interest rate environment, then its disappearance means that capital can again flow in the direction of the best businesses.”
The startup bust has direct negative effects on me personally, as I’m still between technical writing positions, and a lot of the jobs I’ve gotten over the past two decades have been with startups.
