Back when I was doing regular Texas vs. California updates, this is the sort of video I would feature. It covers why Texas is doing so much better than Europe, though the framing misses a few things I’ve tried to highlight below.
Caveat: I don’t know who “The Economic Matrix” is, but what they’re saying is generally right, but a bit incomplete.
“This is Texas. To most of the world, it’s just one of 50 American states. But if you pulled it off the US map and dropped it into the global rankings as its own nation, it would sit eighth in the world, sandwiched directly between France and Italy, with a staggering GDP of $2.77 trillion. But that’s just the start. In 2025, the Texas economy was bigger than the equivalent of the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Austria combined.”
“Texas and Europe are separated by more than an ocean. They’re separated by two completely different ideas of how a state should operate. And right now, one of those ideas is winning by a distance that gets harder to close every year. In 2024, the Texas economy grew by nearly 4%. The entire European Union managed 1%, and the gap is only getting wider.”
“The EU spent most of the last 15 years in crisis mode. A sovereign debt collapse left Greece, Spain, and Portugal on the edge of ruin.” I covered the European Debt Crisis (especially among the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain)) as it was happening, and the thing to remember is that it was (and is) a deficit spending crisis. Like the federal government, European governments insist on spending more than they take in. Real austerity, i.e. cutting outlays until they match receipts, hasn’t failed, it’s been declared difficult and left untried.
“Years of near zero growth followed. The in 2022, Russia cut off the gas and sent inflation across the Euro zone spiking to 9.2%.” Here the video also avoids noting that another big inflation driver was the effects of the Flu Manchu lockdown across most EU economies.
“Through all of that, the Texas economy just kept climbing. The productivity gap tells the same story. Between late 2019 and mid 2024, labor productivity per hour in the Euro zone rose by 0.9%. In the US, it rose by 6.7%. Texas led that charge.”
“Look at the Permian Basin. Oil production nearly tripled in a decade while the rig count was cut almost in half because horizontal drilling and AI-guided extraction meant fewer rigs producing more oil. Same workforce, three times the output.” Oil industry-specific AI has very little do with the current general AI build-out bubble.
“There’s a mathematical reality that makes this trajectory almost impossible to reverse. At 1.5% annual growth, the EU takes roughly 47 years to double in size. At the 3.5% rate Texas usually averages, it takes 20. By the time the EU doubles once, Texas will have doubled twice. That gap compounds and it means every year the distance between these two economic models doesn’t just persist, it accelerates.”
“Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, released a landmark report warning that without serious reform, the EU is heading toward what he called a slow agony. Leaders held a retreat to discuss it. Then they went back to their committees.” Future pain is abstract, while the electoral pain of trying to reform things is far more immediate.
“Since 2020, more than 200 companies have moved their headquarters to Texas. Tesla relocated to Austin in 2021. Chevron, one of the largest energy companies on Earth, announced its move to Houston in 2024. Charles Schwab, CBRE, SpaceX. More than half of these relocations came from California alone.”
“These are not satellite offices or mailbox moves. The reason they gave was simple. The regulatory environment in California made expansion too slow and too expensive. Texas made it fast, cheap, and permanent.”
“Spotify was founded in Stockholm, but listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Skype was built in Estonia and Luxembourg, then bought by Microsoft and absorbed into Redmond. ARM was designed in Cambridge, England, then acquired by a Japanese conglomerate and listed in New York. Europe keeps building the talent. America keeps cashing the check.”
“Beneath the growth stats and the corporate migrations, there’s one factor that explains this gap better than anything else: Energy. Texas produces more energy than almost any country on Earth. Not other American states, actual nations. Between 2007 and 2023, while the rest of the United States saw energy consumption drop by about 5%, Texas went in the other direction. Energy use in the state climbed by 21% and the industrial sector alone saw a 28% jump in demand. This was not a state focused on conservation or cutting back. Texas was building oil rigs, refineries, chemical plants, and massive wind installations, all at the same time.” Those wind farm installations were the result of subsidies, and they’re not really building new ones anymore.
“The reason Texas could pull this off comes down to one decision made decades ago. Texas built its own power grid, specifically to escape the slow motion gears of federal regulation. The result, solar capacity that grew 32% in just 2024, wind generation that leads every other American state, and a massive natural gas fleet running underneath it all to keep the lights on when the sun goes down, cheap, abundant, predictable, and fast to build.” Again, the solar build-out was aided by subsidies.
“For decades, the European energy models rested on one assumption. Buy cheap gas from Russia, build out renewables slowly, and keep industrial costs manageable. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, that assumption collapsed overnight. Wholesale energy prices went vertical. Industrial electricity costs in Germany suddenly hit three to four times what businesses in Texas were paying for the exact same power.”
“Look at what happened to BASF, the largest chemical company in the world. For over 150 years, their home was Ludwigshafen, Germany, a sprawling industrial complex on the Rhine that employed tens of thousands. After 2022, they announced billions in cuts to that site. Plants shuttered, thousands of jobs gone. But BASF didn’t disappear. At the exact same time, they were breaking ground on new facilities in Freeport, Texas. Same company, same products, two completely different decisions driven entirely by the price of electricity.” Probably not just electricity. Union work rules in Germany are considerably less flexible than those in right-to-work Texas.
“France tried to escape this trap by leaning into nuclear power, which once covered 75% of French electricity needs. But that infrastructure is aging. New reactor projects like Flamenville have run tens of billions over budget and more than a decade behind schedule, and the political will to build more has been stuck in debate for a generation. The old Russian gas model is dead. The nuclear renaissance has not arrived. And permitting a single wind farm in the EU can take 7 to 10 years.”
“In Texas, the same process often takes a few months. Energy prices act like a hidden tax on everything from manufacturing steel to running a server farm to heating a bakery. European businesses pay that tax every single day. And Europe does not have the gas, does not have the grid independence, and does not have the permitting speed to change that.” Actually, Europe does have oil and gas reserves it refuses to develop.
“Cheap energy is a huge piece of the puzzle. But the real accelerant for the Texas economy has been something even harder for Europe to copy. And it starts with one number. The average top personal income tax rate across 35 European countries is 38.5%. In Denmark, that number hits a staggering 60.5%. In Germany, France, and Italy, high earners face rates between 45 and 50%.”
“In Texas, the state income tax rate is zero. It’s always been zero, and the Texas Constitution actually makes it illegal for the state to introduce one without a direct vote from the public. This is not a temporary policy that a new government can reverse after the next election. It’s locked into the foundation of the state.”
“Texas still has high property taxes, so the total burden on a normal resident is not as dramatic as that 0% headline suggests. But for the people these economies are competing over, the math is brutal. A senior software engineer in Munich earns roughly €75,000 and takes home about $45,000 after income tax and social contributions. The same engineer in Austin earns $140,000 and takes home over $105,000. same skills, same screen, more than double the money in their pocket at the end of the year. Between 2020 and 2024, Texas startups pulled in over $46 billion in venture capital. In Q1 2025 alone, Texas tech companies raised nearly $3 billion, the biggest single quarter the state had seen in over 2 years, with massive deals in cyber security, defense tech, and biotech.”
“Compare that to the other side of the Atlantic. The entire European Union raised about $17.5 billion for AI funding in all of 2025. The US raised nearly $70 billion for generative AI alone by midyear. Not total tech, not all venture capital, generative AI alone. These two regions are not competing in the same category.”
“The EU’s regulatory framework was designed to protect consumers and level the playing field. GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], the AI Act, 27 different national compliance regimes stacked on top of each other. The intentions were sound, but the unintended result is that the compliance costs favor massive American companies like Google and Microsoft, who can absorb them easily over smaller European rivals who can’t.”
“None of this means Texas has it all figured out, because the truth is it hasn’t. The most visible problem is housing. In 2019, a median Texas family earned 62% more than they needed to buy a median home. By 2023, that cushion had collapsed to just 7%. Not 62%, 7%. Over a third of Texas households now spend more than 30% of their income on housing.” That’s a national problem, partially engendered by the Flu Manchu shutdowns, partially by restrictive local building codes. “Affordable housing” blather snipped, since this is just more unnecessary government subsidy and intervention.
“The workers who actually build the Texas economy, the Tesla line workers, the nurses, the warehouse staff, can’t afford to live in the cities their labor is building anymore. They commute in from further and further out, and the roads, the housing, and the services all fall behind.” Partially true, partially false. Austin housing prices exploded, but have come down dramatically. Dallas and San Antonio prices spiked, then plateaued. Houston prices have continued climbing, but gradually.
“When a place grows this fast, the infrastructure simply can’t keep up.” True of Austin, less true of Houston, though having to rebuild certain interchanges is making things a nightmare for certain commuters.
Discussion of energy grid problems and the 2021 ice storm snipped, since I think we’ve covered those enough here.
“The problems in Texas are the problems of a place growing too fast. The problems in Europe are the problems of a place that is barely growing at all. In that sense, Texas and Europe have something in common. Both are stuck. The difference is that Texas is gridlocked because too many people are trying to get to work. Europe is gridlocked because too many committees are still deciding whether to build the road. Right now, Texas has its sights set on overtaking France, a G7 nation. At current growth rates, that gap closes faster than most people realize. And France’s response, like the rest of Europe’s, has been to wait and see.”
“The real question isn’t whether Europe can change. It’s whether it actually wants to change badly enough to feel the pain that comes with it. Because while Brussels is still writing the rule book, the game is already over for the economies Texas has already passed. The ones still in its path just haven’t checked the scoreboard yet.”
Left out of this coverage: Texas has a constitutionally mandated balanced budget, while the overwhelming majority of European nations keep running budget deficits to keep their cradle-to-grave welfare states afloat.
Not to mention a government run by Republicans rather than unstable coalitions including the Greens…
A whole lot of despicable Democrats voted against remembering Charlie Kirk and denouncing political violence, a whole bunch of lefties are still lying about Kirk, Comey indicted, President Trump officially backs a complete Ukraine victory, a new American stealth fighter enters production, two murderous lefty scumbags die, and an infamous thirty-four year old Austin murder mystery is solved.
“The ‘Study’ You’re Citing About Right-Wing Violence Is Full Of Fake Data.”
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week, conservatives noted that most political violence comes from the left. The left bristles at this fact and has responded by dramatically padding the numbers to pretend the reverse is true.
Consider a Sept. 12 piece from The Economist claiming, “extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”
Right up front, the piece admits it used data “largely compiled by researchers whom sceptical (sic) conservatives would probably dismiss as biased.” The disclaimer is meant to inoculate The Economist’s audience to its sloppy reporting, as if challenges from conservatives will somehow prove The Economist’s accuracy.
Yes, readers should be beyond skeptical of the source in that piece, The Prosecution Project. Its website claims to “track[] and provid[e] analysis of felony criminal cases involving illegal political violence, terrorism, and extremism occurring in the United States since 1990.”
The founder and executive director of the Prosecution Project is Michael Loadenthal, although the links naming the website’s leadership were broken Friday, meaning no names were visible. Google had not yet scrubbed Loadenthal’s name from searches.
Loadenthal is an “openly anarchist Antifa-affiliated … researcher at the University of Cincinnati who, by his own admission, is a far-left violent extremist,” The Federalist reported in 2023.
So we have an Antifa-connected researcher with rabid bias against the right, held out as an expert on deciding who is extreme. It is like using a vegetarian to define which meat eaters are the most humane — none of them, says the vegetarian.
The Prosecution Project lists January 2024 charges against John Reardon of Massachusetts, who made antisemitic threats against synagogues and the Israeli Consulate. It notes, “Influenced by events in Gaza, he also said, ‘you do realize that by supporting genocide that means it’s ok for people to commit genocide against you.’” The Department of Justice never identified Reardon’s political affiliation, but The Prosecution Project’s own account seems to indicate he was a pro-Palestine fanatic, a cause typically associated with Democrats. Yet The Prosecution Project identifies Reardon’s crimes as “rightist” because they’re “identity-focused.”
The group also lists 2022 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act charges against Edmee Chavannes — even though “Chavannes was found not guilty.”
The Prosecution Project even includes the posting of racist stickers in its tracker, as if that’s comparable to terrorism or violence. One wonders if the group will treat Democrats’ desecration of Charlie Kirk memorials with the same seriousness.
Most crimes involving race or abortion businesses are blamed on the right in the data, with nothing to back up those claims. Yet these issues and others often cross over to the left. The Federalist has reported on the progressive anti-abortion movement, for example, and the left’s Marxist oppressor-versus-oppressed framework is manifestly racist.
Comb through the ridiculous data on The Prosecution Project’s website, and you will soon conclude it is worthless to everyone except leftist propagandists trying to downplay Charlie Kirk’s murder and flip the blame for violence in the U.S. to the right.
Similarly, a biased “study” by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute was debunked this week by Amber Duke at The Daily Caller.
Nowrasteh claims politically motivated violence is rare in the U.S., but that when it happens, “right-wing terrorists” are more often to blame than the left — that is, when you exclude the terrorists who killed 2,977 victims on Sept. 11, 2001, and exclude injuries, property damage, and people who were not killed. Thus, his criteria exclude the two assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, for example. Additionally, Duke found that some of the crimes Nowrasteh blamed on the right were at best questionable and at worst downright wrong.
Duke pointed to another lopsided study by the Anti-Defamation League, which also claims the right is to blame for increased political violence. Ryan James Girdusky unpacked those magic numbers and noted glaring omissions. For example, the ADL left the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson out of its study.
Despite the evidence all pointing to Kirk’s killer being on the left wing of the ideological spectrum, the conspiracy theory about a right-wing shooter was pushed by a host of Democratic members of Congress, high-profile left-wing activists, liberal social media influencers, and more.
The most common evidence-free claim on the left has been that the shooter was a follower of far right influencer Nick Fuentes.
Lot’s more quotes from various lefty idiots asserting this connection without proof at the link.
As each new detail trickled out, and the killer’s transgender associations became clearer and clearer, the hysterical spin and assertions of blunt unreality mounted. Cynical pros began inserting outright lies into the mix, as partisan myrmidons took up their work and used it in desperate, craven attempts to either spin facts in ridiculous ways (“his parents are Republicans!”) or simply pretend the facts weren’t “facts” at all. All of it was done with the intent of trying to will into existence — through the spread of fear, uncertainty, and doubt — an alternate narrative whose intended moral calculus amounted to, in so many words, Charlie Kirk was killed by his own team, and this is actually your fault.
So, no, I’m not about to move on just yet.
I could understand a certain amount of denialism at first, because I understand human nature. For those on the left who treat politics like a substitute religion — an increasing number of people in our irreligious age — this moment has been akin to seeing several of the central tenets of your faith publicly refuted. The revelation of the identity of the alleged shooter and the reports about his beliefs were arguably the worst possible scenario for the sorts of loud Democratic types who are deeply invested in the idea of the MAGA right as America’s true fever-swamp of hatred and violence.
I can understand ignorance as well, because I depend on documenting it for a job — the Carnival of Fools would have to fold up its tent without it. In the days before the suspect was caught, it was natural that desperate progressives who get their news from left-wing authorities would use that span of time — when the killer was still at large — to conjure their own arcane interpretive theories in defiance of the known evidence. I feel inevitable disgust at these sad attempts at spin — I know who publicly celebrated the attack on Kirk, after all, and it wasn’t anyone on my side — but again, it was expected.
But I can’t understand any of this after Tyler Robinson was caught on Friday morning. At that point, mere ignorance and wish-casting turned into an active disinformation campaign, and it was particularly appalling to see from people whose civic responsibility it is to know better. To take one example, how about the repellent Eric Swalwell? On Friday afternoon, in an audaciously sleazy bit of “partial storytelling,” the California congressman tweeted: “It doesn’t matter that Kirk’s killer was a straight white male. Or that he was from a Republican family that voted for Donald Trump. Violence has NEVER been the answer.”
If he thought this was a cute joke, he’s a moral reprobate. If he thought it was an effective deceit, he’s also a moral reprobate. I think it is thus fair to conclude that he’s a moral reprobate. The jury’s still out on his fellow California Democratic congressman Dave Min, however, who may simply be stupid. Min said on Saturday: “Now that the Charlie Kirk assassin has been identified as MAGA, I’m sure Donald Trump, Elon Musk and all the insane GOP politicians who called for retribution against the ‘RADICAL LEFT’ will now shift their focus to stopping the toxic violence of the RADICAL RIGHT.” (As it turns out, Dave? No, we won’t!)
How about Harvard Law professor — and Joe Biden legal adviser — Laurence Tribe? Tribe announced on Twitter that the killer “seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals.” (How he got that idea is anybody’s guess.) Later, he deleted the tweet and posted a non-apology accusing the right of “making things up” by associating the killer with transgender or left-wing causes. I can only tell you that once upon a time he had a fine legal mind.
I certainly can’t say the same for Heather Cox Richardson, the world’s most-followed Substacker. Richardson is a Temu Tribe, an oracle of the complacently progressive academic establishment, and demonstrated it once again by going on a podcast on Friday to claim that the killer was a “right-winger” and all those outraged conservatives online were now retreating “in a real hurry.” (Lest you think that was an error born of speaking off the cuff, Richardson put it in writing as well.)
Now that the gaslighting has become impossible to sustain, the left has moved on to its last line of defense: “Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed whom.” It will be a long time before I forget the five days I have just spent being gaslighted both by political operators as well as people who remain transparently in denial. I expected better of them. I held them only to the standards that I hold myself. It was a mistake.
“Trump golf club gunman [Ryan Routh] found guilty after assassination attempt; tries to stab self in court.” The left is sending us an endless parade of violent lunatics and losers.
One of former President Joe Biden’s top aides – Jeff Zients, told the House Oversight Committee on Thursday that an aide with his email credentials was green lighting some of the most controversial ‘autopen’ pardons, that Hunter Biden – who received an insane pardon himself – was involved in the pardon discussions, and that Joe Biden’s brain was pea soup.
According to Axios, Zients – one of the highest ranking officials from the Biden White House – confirmed that Joe Biden had difficulty remembering dates and names, and often required extra briefings to make decisions during the final years of his presidency.
Instead of having three meetings before making a decision, for example, Biden would want four.
Zients said Biden had long had trouble with names and dates, but acknowledged to investigators that the president’s memory of such facts got worse in the final years of his term.
Jill Biden, meanwhile, spoke with Zients about ‘managing Joe’ as Zients was readying himself to take on the role of Chief of Staff in early 2023 – urging him to adjust Biden’s schedule so he could get more rest and return to the White House residence earlier in the evening.
Longtime Biden aide and deputy CoS Annie Tomasini also spoke with Zients about limiting Biden’s schedule and shortening distances and stairs.
According to Fox News, Zients “admitted that President Biden’s speech stumbles increased as he aged,” adding “He also noted that the president’s difficulty remembering dates and names worsened over time, including during the administration.”
Also interesting – Zients told investigators that Hunter Biden was involved in discussions about presidential pardons towards the end of Biden’s term, which included the blanket pardons of several members of the Biden family issued during Joe’s final 24 hours in office. It had been previously reported by NBC News that Hunter was sitting in on White House meetings following the former president’s horrible performance during a June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.
And just like that millions of lefty sorts who piously sand “No one’s above the law!” for the ginned-up Trump indictments all automatically switched to “This is a dangerous precedent!” when it comes to indicting James Comey.
Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted on criminal charges related to allegations that he lied to Congress during testimony in 2020 about whether he authorized a leak of information.
Comey is facing one count of false statements and one count of obstruction of justice, according to a release from the Department of Justice.
“No one is above the law. Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
President Trump reacted gleefully to the indictment in a statement shared to Truth Social.
“JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI.”
“Today he was indicted by a Grand Jury on two felony counts for various illegal and unlawful acts. He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Comey’s indictment in Virginia federal court comes just days before the statute of limitations for the perjury charge was set to run out. The charges come five years after Comey testified on September 30, 2020, before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak information to the press related to the investigations of either possible collusion between Trump and Russia or Hillary Clinton’s use of an unauthorized email system.
During the hearing, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) asked Comey whether he had authorized leaks related to either investigation. Comey reiterated what he said in 2017 congressional testimony, that he had not.
Cruz argued that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had said Comey authorized at least one such disclosure, related to the Clinton investigation. But the Justice Department inspector general found in 2018 that McCabe had “lacked candor when he told Comey, or made statements that led Comey to believe, that McCabe had not authorized the disclosure and did not know who did.”
The charges also center in part on an October 2016 New York Times report, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”
The Times article was in response to reporting in Slate that Trump had established a communications back channel with the Kremlin, involving servers at Trump Tower in Manhattan and Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions.
Hours after the Slate article was published, the Times report related the FBI’s conclusion that the back-channel claim was unfounded. The report also detailed that the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s malign activities in connection with the 2016 campaign were not linked to Trump and his campaign.
Special counsel John Durham probed the leaks to the Times in connection with the story as an unauthorized public disclosure (UPD) of classified information.
The February 2020 closing memorandum for the probe, obtained by veteran journalist Catherine Herridge, found there were two major government sources for the story: James Baker, FBI general counsel and a close adviser to Comey, and FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki. Baker told investigators that he was “under the belief” that he was “ultimately instructed and authorized to [provide information to the Times] by then FBI Director James Comey.”
However, Baker did not claim that Comey gave him a direct order. “Baker indicated that FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki instructed him (Baker) to disclose the information to the NYT, and Baker understood Rybicki was conveying this instruction and authorization from Comey.”
A Dallas U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility was the target of a shooting Wednesday morning that left two detainees dead, one person injured, and the suspect committing suicide at the scene.
According to the Dallas Police Department, law enforcement responded to a call at a Dallas ICE facility after reports that someone had opened fire from an adjacent building.
Two detainees were pronounced dead, with another being rushed to the hospital in critical condition with a gunshot injury.
The suspected shooter, a white male armed with a rifle on a roof, died by suicide as agents approached, FOX4 Dallas reported.
ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons spoke to CNN about the shooting as the event unfolded, saying that the scene is secure and the shooter is “down from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
Bullets found had anti-ICE slogans written on them.
Why people who kept freaking out at Trump negotiating with Putin shouldn’t have. “Trump Says Ukraine Can Win Back All of Its Territory from Russia.”
President Donald Trump declared his belief Tuesday that Ukraine can win its war against Russia outright, an extraordinary shift in tone with significant ramifications for U.S. policy.
Trump shared his views on Truth Social after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
“I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option,” Trump said.
Trump’s position is a 180-degree shift from his longstanding view that Ukraine would have to cede territory to Russia as a condition for ending the war. Moscow holds roughly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory after invading its neighbor three-and-a-half years ago. Russian forces have slowly made gains along the eastern part of Ukraine in what has become a grueling war of attrition with hundreds of thousands of estimated casualties.
Trump argued Russia is a “paper tiger” and suggested Russian people were not aware of the damage Russian President Vladimir Putin has done to their nation. He also praised the “Great Spirit” of Ukraine and said Ukraine could “maybe even go further” than reclaiming its original territory. Trump’s comments are a stark contrast from his past statements that argued Russia was winning the war and likened Zelensky to a dictator.
Trump promised the U.S. would keep sending weapons to NATO for the alliance to use in the way it sees fit. His comments will likely prompt a furious response from Putin and Russian forces in Ukraine. It also remains to be seen how Trump’s restraint-oriented cabinet members and political allies react to his unexpected shift.
As previously observed, Trump’s negotiating strategy works on persuasion and tit-for-tat strategies. Zelensky, after some early stumbles, is finally fully onboard with Trump, while Putin hasn’t offered anything in return to Trump’s overtures. That means that Zelensky gets all the carrots, and Putin gets all the sticks. Golly, who could have seen that one coming except everyone who’s actually watched Trump operate for the last ten years who isn’t suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Ukraine launched another big drone strike, this one on the Saratov oil refinery in Bryanskaya Ulitsa, Saratov Oblast, the third time they’ve hit it since August.
Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth has summoned 800 generals and admirals from around the world to Washington D.C. without telling them what for. They’re going to be pretty surprised when he announces that he’s brought all of them there to talk about Amway…
23-year-old Hunter Nadeau was arrested on scene for shooting multiple victims at the Sky Meadow Country Club in Nashau, New Hampshire, Saturday night. A 59-year-old named Robert DeCesare was killed in front of his family. At least two others were injured.
Tom Bartelson of Pepperell, Massachusetts, is the witness in the video above. He was at his nephew’s wedding in a private room of the club when the gunman entered the building dressed in all black. The shooter yelled, “The children are safe!” and “Free Palestine!” before killing DeCesare. He then moved into the club restaurant and opened fire again.
Funny no matter what the leftwing cause, the solution seems to be murdering American citizens.
A once-celebrated Boston social activist has pleaded guilty to defrauding donors — including Black Lives Matter — out of thousands of dollars that she used as a personal piggy bank.
Monica Cannon-Grant, 44, pleaded guilty Monday to 18 counts of fraud-related crimes that she committed with her late husband while operating their Violence in Boston (VIB) activists group, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts.
The activist scammed money — including $3,000 from a BLM group — while claiming it was to help feed children and run protests like one in 2020 over the murder of George Floyd and police violence.
Cannon-Grant also conned her way into getting $100,000 in federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits — which she used to pay off her personal auto loan and car insurance policy.
But she has now confessed to transferring funds to personal bank accounts to pay for rent, shopping sprees, delivery meals, visits to a nail salon — and even a summer vacation to Maryland.
At least 187 code packages made available through the JavaScript repository NPM have been infected with a self-replicating worm that steals credentials from developers and publishes those secrets on GitHub, experts warn. The malware, which briefly infected multiple code packages from the security vendor CrowdStrike, steals and publishes even more credentials every time an infected package is installed.
You may remember Crowdstrike from such hits as “we helped Hillary Clinton illegally erase her secret email server.”
Speaking of technology running amok: “OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws.” That sounds like the sort6 of cruel fact that should throw a kink in all of these AI company’s getting trillion dollar valuations but somehow won’t.
In California, 13 year old boy killed by sex-abusing, illegal alien soccer coach. The family of boy is “suing Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles for failing to perform a background check on the coach.”
Turns out that when conservatives said they were being unfairly censored due to Biden Administration pressure, they were right all along. “YouTube Lifts Ban on Censored Creators, Admits Biden Admin Pressure Was ‘Unacceptable.'”
Google is making major changes to YouTube’s free speech policies following pressure from House Republicans and shifts among its top competitors.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), an attorney for Alphabet, Google and YouTube’s parent company, announced a series of changes to YouTube’s approach to free speech, including the return of banned creators to the platform and the implementation of a community notes system to replace third-party fact-checkers.
YouTube is rolling back its restrictive policies surrounding political speech, especially the Covid-19 pandemic and elections. The video platform said its reliance on public health authorities was well intentioned, but expressed regret at its impact on public debate on issues that were far from settled.
More broadly, YouTube admitted senior Biden administration officials conducted extensive outreach to YouTube to influence its approach to “misinformation” and Covid-19 content that did not violate YouTube’s policies.
“Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies,” the letter reads.
While YouTube independently enforced its policies, Biden officials “continued to press the Company” to remove content that did not violate the platform’s policies. The letter calls out Biden and other administration officials for creating a “political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms” under the guise of “misinformation.”
President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order later this week declaring that an emerging deal involving the video-sharing app TikTok meets American security needs and constitutes a qualified divestiture under U.S. law, according to people familiar with the matter.
Under the deal, American tech company Oracle will serve as the app’s security provider, which will independently monitor the source code of the app as well as study how a U.S.-controlled copy of the TikTok content recommendation algorithm operates and interacts with phone features and updates.
Oracle will be required to “retrain” a leased duplicate TikTok algorithm…
So it will not necessarily be a Chinese spyware app any more, but will still be malware for your brain…
Good news from the border! “Texas, Southwest Region See ‘Historically Low’ Southern Border Apprehensions in August.”
Texas’ border jurisdictions are scrambling to manage thousands of pending Operation Lone Star cases after key state partners abruptly pulled out, leaving local officials to coordinate housing and transportation for defendants.
Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told Texas Scorecard the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), both of which helped provide housing for illegal crossers arrested under the border security initiative, are no longer handling those responsibilities.
The Del Rio Processing Center is reportedly shutting down, along with Val Verde County’s detention facility—the original epicenter of Operation Lone Star (OLS) prosecutions.
“We’re left holding the bag,” Smith said. “Counties are having to figure this out on their own without the infrastructure the state had in place.”
Smith said approximately half of all prosecutions tied to OLS in Kinney County have already been resolved, either through pleas or dismissals, but thousands of cases remain active.
According to numbers from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, more than 2,600 felony cases have already been resolved. Nearly 2,000 cases are still pending, in part due to lengthy appeals.
Meanwhile, the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office has more than 700 outstanding warrants for alleged smugglers and another 1,400 warrants that have not yet been executed because of limited capacity to house and transport defendants.
Kinney County has contracts with about 10 jails across Texas—including some as far away as the Panhandle—but the county jail cannot hold a person beyond 72 hours, as it is considered a temporary holding facility. That has forced sheriffs and prosecutors into a patchwork system for transferring detainees, with major bottlenecks since TDCJ and TDEM stopped coordinating.
The Dolph Briscoe Unit in Dilley and the Segovia Unit in Edinburg, which had filled major housing roles, are no longer available, worsening the shortage.
Plus border counties have been avoid arresting women because they don’t have room for them in separate facilities.
Amazon settles a lawsuit for tricking people into signing up for Prime and making it nearly impossibility to cancel to the tune of $2.5 billion.
So where did President Trump get the crazy idea that using Tylenol during pregnancy could result in autism? A Harvard study. “Using acetaminophen during pregnancy may increase children’s autism and ADHD risk.”
Austin Yogurt Shop Murders finally solved? retired Austin detective John Jones fingered serial killer and rapist Robert Eugene Brashers (who died in a standoff with police in 1999) as the culprit. Brashers is a serial killer and rapist who committed at least three murders between 1990 and 1998 in the states of South Carolina and Missouri. He died in January 1999 by suicide during a standoff with police. Evidently a new type of DNA testing finally matched up Brashers as the culprit.
More scenes from The Fall Of England: “Muslim who shouted ‘I’m going to kill you’ while stabbing man is given suspended sentence by British court; victim charged instead.”
UK’s Labour government thought they could get away with some cost-free virtue signaling by recognizing “a Palestinian state.” Surprise! “UK could face claim for $2,700,000,000,000 in reparations for recognizing Palestinian state.”
Gov. Greg Abbott today announced a $5.5 million grant from Texas for the construction of a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Harris County — one of multiple projects approved under the Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation (JETI) program over the past year.
Abbott joined Eli Lilly and Company executives for a press conference on Tuesday afternoon in Houston to announce its creation of a nearly one million-square foot active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing facility. The company estimated that it’ll produce around 600 new jobs and will invest more than $6.5 billion within the state.
The grant of $5.5 million towards Lilly’s new project was made possible through the JETI approval process, a property tax abatement program established through contentious legislation passed during the 88th regular legislative session.
House Bill (HB) 5, which was signed into law by Abbott in June 2023, replaced a 20-year-old initiative with a new economic incentive program. It created a pathway for school districts to grant companies a decade-long break in their property tax payments in exchange for relocation to their area. It limited the kinds of companies eligible to receive abatements and grants for projects in Texas, excluding renewable energy projects after negotiations proved its removal to be necessary for passage in the Legislature.
Let me reiterate my general opposition to government subsidies of business in almost all circumstances. Government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers. However, an end to subsidizing money-losing “renewable energy” sources that made the Texas Interconnect Grid less reliable is a big plus.
One of the first projects approved under JETI this year, also in Harris County, was to assist Summit Next Gen in opening “a world-class sustainable aviation fuel manufacturing and refining facility along the Texas Gulf Coast,” in January 2025. It’s expected to produce over $1.6 billion in capital investment for Texas.
In February, Abbott made two JETI expansion project announcements: one for a new Braven Environmental facility in Texarkana, estimated to rake in more than $145 million in investment for the state, and the other for Vinton Steel’s “advanced manufacturing facility that recycles ferrous scrap into new steel products.” Vinton is expected to invest over $229 million in the state and create an additional 180 new jobs.
Brazos Midland Processing LLC, also known as Brazos Midstream, was announced as an approved recipient in late August for a “300 million cubic feet per day natural gas processing plant” in Martin County, expected to create $185 million in capital investment.
At Tuesday’s announcement of the new Lilly project, Abbott reiterated that “Texas is the best state in America for doing business.”
And speaking of unreliable renewable energy subsidies: “$2.2 billion solar plant in California scheduled to be turned off after years of wasted money.” That would be Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert, the one that used mirrors to concentrate light onto a single tower, and which fried lots of birds every year. I’m surprised that it was still running, given how markedly unsuccessful it’s been at generating affordable energy years ago. But I may be confusing it with the similar (and similarly failed) Crescent Dunes project. That’s the one that suffered the molten salt leaks… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Dwight also brought news of the deaths of two murderous leftwing scumbags: Would-be Gerald R. Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore, and JoAnne Chesimard, aka “Assata Shakur”, of the Black Liberation Army, who murdered New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. The latter died in Havana. Rot in hell, commie.
California attorney hit with $10,000 fine for brief filled with fake ChatGPT quotes. “The Los Angeles-area attorney fined last week, Amir Mostafavi, told the court that he did not read text generated by the AI model before submitting the appeal in July 2023, months after OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as capable of passing the bar exam.” The real fine should be no client ever willing to trust his lazy ass again..
This is pretty damn funny:
The White House has placed a photo of an auto-pen signature instead of a portrait of former President Biden on the “Presidential Walk of Fame” pic.twitter.com/4HRU7g8Vr8
“The radical Lower East Side shop that lured drug addicts to its storefront by offering free clothing, food and Narcan suddenly shut down Tuesday — sparking internal warfare and finger pointing.”
Without warning, Bluestockings Cooperative announced that it would permanently shut down after more than 26 years, stating that “daily operations are unfortunately no longer sustainable on multiple fronts.”
“This was our absolute last resort. On top of our crew’s ongoing struggle against the organized abandonment of New York City and the constant crises, the remaining worker-owner and staff are at the limits of what they can manage in terms of health, disability, and finances,” a statement posted to Instagram reads.
The Suffolk Street shop blamed the closure on its failure as a worker-owned cooperative to “come to consensus around the guiding principles and practices Bluestockings should embody” — adding that an inability to align on political and business operations directly led to the setbacks the business faced over the last two years.
“Of course, $12,000 a month in rent, thousands in utilities, and racist, classist violence from ‘neighbors’ certainly didn’t make our work any easier,” the statement continued.
Bluestockings came under intense outrage from its posh Lower East Side neighborhood, which transformed into a “zombie apocalypse” of strung-out junkies shooting up in broad daylight who were drawn to the bookstore’s free and indiscriminate services.
The self-described “radically inclusive” shop was a state-recognized Opiate Overdose Prevention Program and offered “harm reduction services” like Narcan, drug-testing strips and a used needle-drop off bin — which neighbors alleged enabled the junkies.
In recent years, Bluestockings plunged into around $100,000 in debt to its publishers and book distributors, according to reports.
Social justice is incompatible with both profit and basic human decency. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Trump tackles mail-in ballot fraud, the Democrat Party sinks (and sinks, and sinks), millionaires and billionaires pump money to the same lefties who decry them, a kangaroo verdict gets slapped down, a platoon of swamp creatures get smacked down, Ukrainian drones are producing gas shortages in Russia, Lebanon declares itself Iranian influence-free, a heavyweight joins the Texas AG race, Dade bows out, a neo-Nazi expertly trolls the German justice system, and Facebook’s AI wants to have sexytime with your children.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The next voting fraud vector President Trump is ready to tackle: mail-in voting fraud.
President Donald Trump has been warning for years that mail-in ballots and voting machines are riddled with vulnerabilities that invite fraud and undermine trust in elections. We’ve discussed these vulnerabilities here at PJ Media extensively, and now Trump is taking action on them. On Monday morning, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he will issue an executive order to put an end to mail-in ballots before the 2026 midterms and restore “honesty and integrity” to America’s elections.
In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump announced, “I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” He argued that such machines cost “Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”
Trump said the United States stands alone in continuing to use widespread mail-in voting. “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED,” he wrote.
The president made clear that he intends to act quickly, pledging to use executive authority to move the plan forward. “WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” Trump said.
Snip.
In 2021, Democrats in Congress tried to ram through a series of radical bills — the Freedom to Vote Act, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the For the People Act — that would have federalized state elections and permanently undermined election integrity. These schemes included universal mail-in ballots, counting votes up to ten days after Election Day, automatic voter registration, granting felons the right to vote, and even laying the groundwork to abolish the Electoral College altogether. It was a brazen attempt to lock in Democrat power forever by destroying the safeguards that protect free and fair elections.
Trump’s announcement proves that election integrity will be a central priority of his presidency as the 2026 midterms approach.
Some think Trump will run into states rights issues. We’ll see…
A federal appeals court handed the Trump administration a decisive 2-1 victory Wednesday, ruling that the president can proceed with cutting nearly $2 billion in previously approved foreign aid payments. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned a lower court’s order that had required the administration to continue sending taxpayer funds abroad.
How the Working Families Party sells itself as “grassroots” — with IRS-documented, publicly admitted “common control” revealing it’s really a Soros-financed political money washer.
In New York politics, there’s one machine that towers above the rest. No, not the Democratic Party—it’s the Working Families Party, the most powerful minor party in America. Its name sounds wholesome enough—who doesn’t support “working families”? But behind that branding lies a $2 billion tax-exempt laundromat that’s anything but local, grassroots, or honest.
Take Zohran Mamdani, their current belle of the ball.
Easy answer: Zohran Mandani is the product of a grassroots washing syndicate of 501c3 and 501c4 entities funded by George Soros and Silicon Valley billionaires. He is their manufactured product.
Easy answer: Zohran Mandani is the product of a grassroots washing syndicate of 501c3 and 501c4 entities funded by George Soros and Silicon Valley billionaires. He is their manufactured product.
After winning his race, he announced on NBC: “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” Hilarious considering Mamdani’s “grassroots” revolution was fueled by over $2 million in PAC and organizational spending, much of it courtesy of the very billionaire class he allegedly opposes.
This is the theater of modern politics: denounce wealth while being powered by it. And the actors know their audience. They’ve learned that if you slap “grassroots” on the packaging, voters won’t check the label.
But let’s check it anyway.
The money trail revealed in Sam Antar’s breaking report is straightforward enough. Soros donates to the Open Society Institute, a $4.5 billion “charity” that enjoys generous tax deductions. OSI then transfers millions to other “charities” like Tides Foundation, which mysteriously claims to run a $350 million operation with zero employees. From there, the money “converts” into political cash: Tides passes funds to the Working Families Organization, a 501(c)(4), which then wires millions to PACs that bankroll candidates like Mamdani.
What you have is billionaire money dressed up in “working families” clothing, masquerading as the will of the people while being anything but.
Drawing on data from the nonpartisan data firm L2, the New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher conducted an in-depth analysis of the changes in these numbers over the past few election cycles. His findings paint a stark picture for the Democratic Party. It is in the midst of what he calls a “voter registration crisis,” with the party “hemorrhaging voters long before they even reach the polls.”
Goldmacher first looked at how these figures shifted between 2020 and 2024. In the span of four years, Democrats lost roughly 2.1 million registered voters across the 30 states and the district that track party affiliation, while the GOP gained approximately 2.4 million.
As the map below shows, Democrats fell behind in each one of these states. This includes blue states such as California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island, as well as the swing states of Arizona, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
NEW at NYT: The Democratic Party is facing a voter registration crisis in red, blue and battleground states alike — losing ground to the GOP everywhere.
My deep dive into the numbers and what it reveals about the party's brand.
The shift in Pennsylvania has been dramatic. In November 2020, Democrats held a registration advantage of 517,310 active voters. Today, that margin has shrunk to just 53,303.
A similar scenario has played out in North Carolina, where Democrats once enjoyed a 400,000-voter edge. Their lead now stands at less than 17,000.
Goldmacher noted that, in percentage terms, Democrats’ advantage over Republicans narrowed from nearly 11 points in 2020 to just over 6 points in 2024.
President Donald Trump was still able to win because so many Democratic votes are concentrated in deep-blue strongholds such as California and New York. By contrast, large red states such as Texas don’t allow voters to register by party affiliation — and thus aren’t reflected in the data.
In some cases, Democrats still retained an edge over Republicans (such as in Pennsylvania). But the majority of new registrations in other states, such as Florida, shifted from Democrats to the GOP. Goldmacher expects more states to follow.
Moreover, between 2018 and 2024, new young voters have shifted noticeably toward the Republican Party. In 2018, 66% of voters under 45 registered as Democrats, but by 2024 that share had fallen to just 48%.
Goldmacher reported that, last year, for the first time since 2018, new voter registrations nationwide favored Republicans over Democrats.
That was a long time ago and today Democrats’ image is significantly worse and over a wider range of cultural issues than it was back then. The animus toward the party among working-class voters has reached epic proportions and Democrats appear clueless on how to overcome that. The reigning theories seem to be talking more about economics (“kitchen table issues” or, more daringly, “abundance”), insisting they’re “fighters” and cussing a lot. Damon Linker gets to the heart of how absolutely hopeless this approach is.
[W]hat liberals need to do to defeat right-wing populism…[is] to moderate on culture. That means on policies and moral stances wrapped up with the old culture war (like trans and other gender-related issues) as well as in other areas of policy that have a strong cultural valance—like crime, immigration, and DEI. This isn’t just necessary because Democratic positions on these issues are unpopular at the moment. It’s also crucial because culture is more fundamental than politics: It sends a signal to voters about where a politician or party stands on base-level moral questions. When voters become convinced that a specific politician or party has bad (or just sufficiently different) moral judgment, they lose trust in that politician or party. And then other, more superficial policy commitments don’t matter…
The area surrounding the Texas-Arkansas border has been solidly Republican for a while, but the Biden people wanted to demonstrate that federal dollars are available to all, regardless of political leanings, and they hoped they might be able to tilt the area’s partisan alignment a bit back toward the Dems if those dollars were used to jump-start a solar-panel-construction industry in the region, creating jobs and boosting the local economy in other ways…The money arrived, but in the 2024 election, the region voted even more overwhelmingly for Donald Trump than it had in the previous two election cycles…The effort failed because the voters in Texarkana, like voters in rural and exurban communities around the country, have learned to distrust the Democrats on fundamental issues of morality and culture, making them disinclined to trust them on anything else…
The way to [reach these skeptical voters] is for the party to make an effort to distance itself from the leftward cultural stances associated with its most animated progressive activists, but also often affirmed by many millions of well-educated upper-middle-class white and often female professionals. Since people fitting this description frequently hold top jobs in the Democratic Party itself, this is a hard ask…
This, I’m convinced, is the top challenge facing liberalism and the Democratic Party today.
Exactly. This is the top challenge facing the Democrats today. Yet they are shockingly M.I.A. in dealing with it. Democrats overwhelmingly would rather do anything than do what is needed: two, three many Sister Souljah moments. Consider how Democrats have handled culturally-inflected issues since their 2024 election defeat.
Trans? A few peeps, quickly slapped down by the Groups and party activists.
Immigration? Everything Trump’s doing is wrong. We’ll only cooperate with federal law enforcement when we feel like it.
Crime? Not a problem. Everything’s going great—especially in D.C.! Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries: “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” Trump’s turning D.C. into a police state!
Race? DEI is wonderful and we’ll defend it to our dying breath. Same thing with racial preferences. Those who oppose these policies are racists and white supremacists.
The list could go on. Using the traditional 0-10 Sister Souljah scale, where zero is doing nothing at all, 5 is barely adequate, and 10 is what Bill Clinton did, I’d give today’s Democrats a 1 for the occasional grudging admission in interviews and the like that maybe the Democrats have overdone their noble commitments a little bit (though of course their heinous opponents are 100 percent wrong). And the 1 might be generous.
Teixeira is 100% right on the problem, and on Democrats complete inability to address the problem. Sister Souljah is the Democratic Party. The insane wing is in the process of driving out the last remnants of the Corrupt Wing, the latter of which foolishly believes that actually winning elections is somehow more important than the perpetual virtue signaling festival to remind those inbred redneck freaks of JesusLand that Democrats are the Good People, and anyone who disagrees is a hetronormative racist transphobic white supremacist who must be cancelled at all costs.
Social Justice controls the ideological core of the Party hook, line and sinker. Opposing social justice is heretical #WrongThink that must be punished. Social justice warriors cannot be argued out of their convictions by logic, as logic had nothing to do with forming them. Social justice is a religious imperative, and the only way to free the party from the grip of social justice is to burn it to the ground. The Democrat Party needs to go the way of the Whigs. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced Tuesday that she will be revoking security clearances for 37 current and former intel officials for allegedly abusing the public’s trust by manipulating information and conducting political activities.
The officials on Gabbard’s list includes former top aides to Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was involved with a discredited intelligence assessment that claimed Russia favored once-and-current President Donald Trump to win the 2016 election over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Gabbard has accused the 37 officials accused of politicizing and weaponizing intelligence, failing to safeguard classified information, or other instances of failing to follow standards.
Andrew Cedar: Former Senior Director for Global Engagement at the National Security Council
Andrew P. Miller: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs
Benjamin A. Cooper: Associate Scholar in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Beth E. Sanner: Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration
Brett M. Holmgren: Former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research
Charles A. Kupchan: Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and former Senior Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council
Christopher Center: Former intelligence analyst and official
Corinne A. Graff: Former Senior Advisor at the United States Institute of Peace
Dipreet K. Sidhu: Former intelligence and policy official
Edward Gistaro: Former National Intelligence Officer for Europe
Emily J. Horne: Former Spokesperson and Senior Director for Press at the National Security Council
Harry Hannah: Former intelligence official
Heather R. Gutierrez: Former intelligence analyst
Jamie S. Jowers: Former intelligence and policy advisor
Jeffrey M. Prescott: Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture
Joel T. Meyer: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Initiatives at the Department of Homeland Security
Joel Willett: Former CEO of Cybermedia Technologies
John W. Ficklin: Former Senior Director for Records and Access Management at the National Security Council
Julia S. Gurganus: Former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia
Julia Santucci: Former Director for Egypt at the National Security Council
Loren DeJonge Schulman: Former Deputy Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security
Luke R. Hartig: Former Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council
Maher B. Bitar: Former Coordinator for Intelligence and Defense Policy at the National Security Council
Mark B. Feierstein: Former Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at USAID
Mary Beth Goodman: Deputy Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Megan F. Doherty: Former Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Middle East at USAID
Michael P. Dempsey: Former Acting Director of National Intelligence
Perry Blatstein: Former intelligence analyst
Richard H. Ledgett: Former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency
Samantha E. Vinograd: Former Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention at the Department of Homeland Security
Sarah S. Farnsworth: Former intelligence official
Shelby L. Pierson: Former Intelligence Community Election Threats Executive
Stephanie O’Sullivan: Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
Thomas W. West: Former Special Representative for Afghanistan
Thom X. Nguyen: Former intelligence analyst
William J. Tuttle: Former intelligence official
Yael Eisenstate: Former Vice President of Global Affairs at the Anti-Defamation League
I’m including the entire list here because I think it’s important to name and shame. Also, having this posted and tagged lets me keep track when one of those swamp creatures pops up in a new role, and helps track the corruption of previously important institutions (I’m looking at you, ADL).
Speaking of swamp creatures: “Kash Patel’s FBI raids John Bolton’s home, office in probe over sending classified documents to family.” Bolton reminds me of Mark Felt, Watergate’s “Deep Throat,” in that both stabbed metaphorical knives in the President they served over being denied the influence and deference they felt they deserved. Bolton was actually a pretty good UN ambassador, where he served the useful function of scaring the shit out of America’s foreign enemies. Alas, he Peter Principled himself to National Security Advisor, where he never got on the same page with Trump’s unorthodox (but effective) diplomacy.
“LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans, has been indicted on Federal charges….The indictment alleges that [Cantrell] and Jeffrey Paul Vappie, a member of her Executive Protection Unit (EPU), developed a personal relationship in October 2021. To conceal their relationship and maximize their time together, they allegedly created a scheme to defraud the City of New Orleans by engaging in personal activities while Vappie was on duty and being paid for providing protection.” They were canoodling on the taxpayer’s dime. (Previously: “It’s the mayor’s exorbitant travel spending that has people up in arms. She traveled to sister cities Ascona, Switzerland, and Juan Antibes-les-Pins on the French Riviera this summer, costing the City of New Orleans close to $45,000, including first-class international airfare with lie-flat seating.”)
“The Unecha pumping station which is part of the Druzhba pipeline has been hit for the second time this week by drones.” This is near to the border with Belarus.
“Unprecedented Shift In Lebanon’s Attitude Towards Iran: Our Government’s Decision To Disarm Hizbullah Stands; We Will Not Tolerate Your Intervention In Our Internal Affairs; Relations With Lebanon Must Be Conducted Via State Institutions, Not Via Hizbullah,” MEMRI, August 14, 2025:
On August 13, 2025, during his visit to Lebanon, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, heard unequivocally from Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam that Lebanon is no longer under Iranian patronage and will not tolerate Iranian dictates or interference in its internal affairs.
Larijani’s visit came amid tension between the two countries that followed the historic August 5 decision by the Lebanese government to disarm Hizbullah by the end of the year – a decision that sparked rage in Hizbullah’s patron Iran. Iranian officials, among them Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, as well as Ali Akbar Velayati, top advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and Iraj Masjedi, deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, expressed their vehement opposition to the Lebanon’s sovereign decision, claiming that it reflected not the will of the Lebanese people but only Israeli and American aspirations. These senior Iranian officials voiced support for Hizbullah’s refusal to comply with the demand to disarm, and warned that Hizbullah could thwart this plan because it had already rebuilt itself following the war with Israel and is now “at the height of its powers.” They added that Iran would support the organization in this matter.
Lebanon was quick to respond to these statements, perceiving them as direct and blatant interference in its domestic affairs. In a notable response, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry issued, unprecedentedly, not one but two harsh condemnations of “the violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty, unity, and stability.”
More condemnation and criticism came from the anti-Hizbullah and anti-Iran camp in Lebanon, which called on the Lebanese government to take diplomatic measures against Iran, such as expelling the Iranian ambassador and even severing relations with Iran, in addition to filing a complaint with the UN Security Council.
Israel’s decision to crush Iran’s terrorist catspaws continues to reap benefits across the region.
The Texas Attorney General’s race just got a major shake up.
Conservative firebrand and U.S. House Freedom Caucus member Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX-21) will run for Texas attorney general, the four-term legislator told The Texan.
“It has been my honor to represent the 21st Congressional District of Texas — the best part of the best state in the greatest country in the history of the world. I am particularly proud of our work to deliver on President Trump’s agenda and fight to drain the swamp. I could do it forever and be fulfilled professionally. But representatives should not be permanent,” Roy said in a release.
“And my experience watching Texans unite in response to the devastating Hill Country floods made clear that I want to come home. I want to take my experience in Congress, as a federal prosecutor, and as First Assistant Attorney General to fight for Texas from Texas.”
Roy’s 21st Congressional District stretches from Austin to San Antonio and west of Kerrville. During the devastating Hill Country flooding last month that killed over 130 people, Roy, who represents the area, was on the ground in the community more than most other state officials responding to the disaster.
He joins a field that includes state Sens. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston) and Joan Huffman (R-Houston), as well as former Department of Justice appointee Aaron Reitz. Polling released by Texas Southern University on Thursday morning, which did not include Roy, put Huffman at 12 points, Middleton at eight, and Reitz at seven with nearly three-quarters of respondents undecided.
Previously Ted Cruz’s chief of staff before getting elected to congress, Roy has to be considered the immediate favorite to win the Republican nomination.
Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party stripped the party’s endorsement of radical leftist Minnesota state Sen. Omar Fateh in the Minneapolis mayoral race over “brazen cheating.” The emerging election cheating scandal hilariously occurred amongst Democrats. Awkwardly, this comes from the same party of woke leftists that insists U.S. elections are the “safest in the world” and free from manipulation. Clearly, this corrupt party that serves progressive elites – not the working class – wants a do-over in this local election.
On Thursday, Minnesota DFL chair Richard Carlbom wrote in a statement, “After a thoughtful and transparent review of the challenges, the Constitution, Bylaws & Rules Committee found substantial failures in the Minneapolis Convention’s voting process on July 19, including an acknowledgement that a mayoral candidate was errantly eliminated from contention.”
Carlbom added, “Now it’s time to turn our focus to unity and our common goal: electing DFL leaders focused on making life more affordable for Minnesotans and holding Republicans accountable for the chaos and confusion they’ve unleashed on Minnesotans.”
A series of challenges were submitted to the Minnesota DFL after last month’s convention, citing serious issues with the electronic voting system and raising questions about election integrity in Fateh’s endorsement over incumbent Jacob Frey. The Minneapolis DFL also recognized it had erroneously eliminated DeWayne Davis after the first round of voting due to 176 undercounted votes.
Funny how Democrats swear up and down that there’s absolutely no voting fraud…until they accuse a fellow Democrat.
Trump is calling on Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook to resign over mortgage fraud allegations, namely claiming two separate homes as her primary residence.
Moribund lefty legacy outlet MSNBC is rebranding as MS NOW. Until that woke hive of scum and villainy is entirely purged, no sane American will ever trust it.
“Texas Is Preparing To Cut Off Power To Data Centers During Grid Emergencies.” Well, yeah. If it’s data centers or people’s homes and apartments, people should generally win. Data centers should have backup power and orderly shutdown procedures, not to mention redundant arrays of backups and rotating off-site backups…
Texas Democratic State Rep. James Talarico (TX-50) decries the effects of money on politics while taking “a whopping $59,000 in donations from a billionaire’s PAC last year. The Texas Sands PAC, which is pushing for the Lone Star State to legalize casino gambling, gave Talarico the donations to encourage him to lead that initiative.”
“Senator launches investigation into Meta over allowing ‘sensual’ AI chats with kids.” It seems that all the billions Facebook has been sinking into AI has only made the world worse. Much like Facebook itself…
Flesh-eating bacteria is on the rise again. Avoiding swimming in the ocean or eating raw oysters seems to be the key to avoiding it.
Dwight has a swell obit up for RAF Flight Lt. John Cruickshank, a Catalina pilot who was so shot up by a U-boat, with blood soaking through his flight suit, that his crewmembers thought he wouldn’t make it on the five hour flight home. Not only did he make it back to help land the plane, he lived to be 105.
“U.S. Agriculture Secretary Rollins, Gov. Abbott Announce $850 Million to Combat New World Screwworm Threat. Hundreds of millions will be appropriated by the federal government to build a sterile fly facility.”
German neo-Nazi claims to be a woman so he can serve his time in a women’s prison. ‘Sven Liebich, who now goes by ‘Marla-Svenja,’ was convicted of “slander and incitement to hatred’ and lost his bid to appeal. Now that he’s headed to jail, he has suddenly identified as a woman, despite previously calling transgender people ‘parasites.'” Liebich appears to be an actual neo-Nazi rather than just an AfD member, and neo-Nazis are scum, but you have to admire the brazenness of the hustle, especially not even bother to shave off his mustache, and actually demanding kosher meals.
I finally had time to finish this postmortem post on the Texas winter storm energy grid crisis. I’ve got a ton of pieces to get through, so let’s dig in.
Here were two problems, one short term and one long term—which exacerbated the short-term one.
The short-term failure came at about 1 a.m. Monday when ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures, and arranged for more generation.
Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (in the ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation.
This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants.
In the last four to five years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today.
We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar, which is cheap for two reasons—it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can.
Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to a total of 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity statewide, though they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity.
Wind and solar, with state and federal subsidies, have pushed reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market.
Equipment failure turned out to be a big part of the problem.
“Beginning around 11:00 p.m. [Sunday night], multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s electric grid.
What does that mean? Equipment literally froze in the single digit temperatures and stopped working.
Then, as reserves diminished, ERCOT asked transmission providers to turn off large industrial users that had previously agreed to be shut down. But the situation deteriorated quickly, requiring rotating outages that have lasted hours for many Texans.
Electric generating plants did not properly winterize their equipment, said Dr. David Tuttle in the latest episode of the Y’all-itics political podcast. Tuttle is a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There are things that can be done, but it will cost some money,” he added. “About every decade we have these long-sustained periods. And then, you know weatherization is supposed to happen, and then, it doesn’t because it costs money.”
As Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse?
But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only surprise is that the house of cards collapsed in the dead of winter, not the toasty Texas summers that usually shatter peak electricity demand records.
The blackouts, which have left as many as 4 million Texans trapped in the cold, show the numerous chilling consequences of putting too many eggs in the renewable basket.
Snip.
On the whole, Texas is losing reliable generation and counting solely on wind and solar to keep up with its growing electricity demand. I wrote last summer about how ERCOT was failing to account for the increasing likelihood that an event combining record demand with low wind and solar generation would lead to blackouts. The only surprise was that such a situation occurred during a rare winter freeze and not during the predictable Texas summer heat waves.
Yet ERCOT still should not have been surprised by this event, as its own long-term forecasts indicated it was possible, even in the winter. Although many wind turbines did freeze and total wind generation was at 2 percent of installed capacity Monday night, overall wind production at the time the blackouts began was roughly in line with ERCOT forecasts from the previous week.
We knew solar would not produce anything during the night, when demand was peaking. Intermittency is not a technical problem but a fundamental reality when trying to generate electricity from wind and solar. This is a known and predictable problem, but Texas regulators fooled themselves into thinking that the risk of such low wind and solar production at the time it was needed most was not significant.
“By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid, and wind generation bottomed out at 2 [percent] of installed capacity by Monday night,” said Jason Isaac, director of Life:Powered, a project of Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former state lawmaker.
“Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts—inconvenient but manageable—instead turned into 4 million Texans left in the cold and without answers,” he continued. “To make matters worse, ERCOT shut down power at natural gas substations in the Permian, leading to further shortages.”
Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller has since said Texas should stop building wind turbines; focus on gas, coal, and oil; and called for the firing of Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees to the Public Utility Commission—the government body that oversees ERCOT.
But was this crisis foreseeable? Isaac says yes.
“We’ve known for years that a weather event combining low wind and solar production and record demand could lead to blackouts,” he told Texas Scorecard. “This week, that event became a reality as new wind and solar generation failed to produce when it was needed the most, and it appears ERCOT fell asleep at the wheel.”
For years, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) has overestimated the ability to maintain a reliable grid without a sufficient supply buffer, known as a “reserve margin.” That margin is the difference between demand for electricity and what the grid can produce. When demand exceeds production, you get blackouts. That buffer has been shrinking because reliable sources of energy have been retired, few reliable plants have been constructed, and the grid is depending more and more on weather-dependent renewable energy that repeatedly fails to perform when we need it most.
When wind and solar production predictably dropped as the winter storm hit, the buffer collapsed. ERCOT needed to execute a series of balancing measures that would have protected the grid. But it did not act soon enough, which caused many more gas and some coal power plants in the system to “trip.” (Think of it as a circuit breaker that triggers to prevent a fire or other emergency at your house when there is a system imbalance.) Other weather-related issues caused problems too but ERCOT’s failure to act sooner was a major factor.
Usually, a system trip wouldn’t last long and we’d have power back in a few hours. But this time, many of the units that were tripped off the system had difficulty coming back online for a variety of reasons, including the fact that some were not designed to be taken off and put back on the system quickly, as well as other cold weather issues that exacerbated the problem.
So when people blame ERCOT for not acting quickly, they’re right. And so are the people who say that both renewable energy and fossil energy plants are not generating what they should. But it doesn’t begin there. Our overdependence on unreliable energy that caused the razor thin reserve margins started the ball rolling years ago.
Here’s the long story.
Keeping the power on is a bit of a guessing game played out every day by the grid operator to make sure we have the right mix of energy getting on to the grid. There’s that buffer, the reserve margin, which ERCOT uses to give it some leeway in making moves. As with anything, the more reliable and predictable the source of energy, the better moves ERCOT can make.
However, the race to add in renewables pushed out more reliable forms of energy and kept new reliable energy from being built. That resulted in the buffer in our electric grid being stripped out—going from more than a 20% surplus years ago to single digits in the last couple of years.
Without that buffer, our system has become much more vulnerable to outages when we see extreme heat or extreme cold. The problem is made worse by the fact that renewables have grown to become a significant percentage of our fleet, making our power grid much more susceptible to weather-related shortages. That is because renewables do not show up when we need power the most (high heat, freezing cold, big storms, etc.)
Here’s an informative thread on how the Texas energy market is set up and how some of the system was offline when the worst hit:
The ERCOT grid is a very complex beast. It can’t call on other grids for support (but that is a bit overrated as typically when you need power so does your adjacent region, but that’s later).
ERCOT is a 501c3 nonprofit that is charged with managing the market, but above all, reliability (keeping the lights on). In my experience some of the smartest people I’ve ever met work there. Wish I could name some of them because they’re absolutely brilliant.
Retail guys, municipalities, and cooperatives are the guys who buy power wholesale and sell it to the end user (residentials, commercials, industrials).
Retail outside of municipal or cooperative areas can shop for a retail provider. 8/
This year, ~20,000MW of (gas and coal) Power plants requested an outage. ERCOT runs an outage study looking at demand and other available resources, and then says yes. (They make sure all the plants in Houston aren’t out for example because that would jack up Houston rates). 12/
If those plants could be back up they would’ve because they want to make big money. So, Feb 11th, we go to bed, wake up to a coating of ice. This ice is thick and persistent. Next day, sun is out, roads are good. Maybe we’re through the worst?
On the night of the 15th, between midnight and 3 am, 8000MW of gas, 1200MW of Nukes, and 2000MW of coal trip off the grid. Culprits are frozen gas pipelines and water for steam. (Note the Big gas drops)
I think here he’s conflating a few different things; it’s unclear how much capacity was taken off line due to insufficient weatherization and how much was caused by ERCOT foolishly inducing blackouts in the gas-producing Permian Basin.
So no water through the pipe, no steam. No gas no gas to heat that water.
That trip caused a lot of the outages and most of the outrage.
So ERCOT’s only options in these situations is: 1) cut off a big chunk of the customers. 2) let the whole system trip and take months to get back to normal.
Last thing. In 2011. We had a bad winter but it was followed by a drought and the worst summer ever. Power plants didn’t have water in their lakes to run the plant. 100 days over 100°. The grid focused on that issue instead of the cold.
Nationally, retail electric sales generated $117 billion in 3Q2022, $10.9 billion in Texas (of which $6.3 billion was residential) and $14.5 billion in California. 2/12
If Texans paid what Californians did for electricity, Texans would have paid $13.2 billion more, or about $508 more per person in the state for those three months in 2020. 4/12
One aspect of Texas’ failure has been the rapid grown of unreliables (wind and solar) subsidized by federal and state policy concurrent with the shedding of reliable power (coal and natural gas). 6/12
We suggest making all electricity producers guarantee dispatchable power for Texas’ grid—this means that the unreliables would have to secure agreements… 8/12
Mitchell Rolling explains: “As you can see, the top three performing energy sources during the energy crisis in Texas were all fuel-based energy sources: nuclear, coal, and natural gas. On average, these three energy sources alone provided over 91 percent of all electricity generated throughout the energy emergency, as the graph below shows. Without these energy sources on the grid providing the bulk of electricity, the situation in Texas would have gone from bad to worse.”
The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.
That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels.
But attempting to electrify everything would concentrate our energy risks on an electricity grid that is already breaking under the surge in demand caused by the crazy cold weather. Across America, countless people don’t have electricity. I’m one of them. Our power here in central Austin went out at about 3 am. I am writing this under a blanket, have multiple layers of clothes on, and am nervously watching my laptop’s battery indicator.
This blizzard proves that attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if — or rather, when — a widespread or extended blackout occurs.
One of the most contested issues is the role wind generation has played. Prior to the onset of the storm last week, Texas led the nation in wind power generation and depended on the wind turbines in West-Central and Western Texas, along with a smaller number of turbines along the Gulf Coast, for about 25% of its electricity. As wind power has increased, coal-powered generation plants have been taken offline around the state. Texas has abundant coal, oil, and natural gas, and also has nuclear plants near Dallas and near Houston.
Real-time data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that wind power collapsed as the winter storm swept across the state.
Snip.
As the graph plainly shows, wind generation choked down but natural gas compensated. Coal and even nuclear power generation dipped. Solar generation has been negligible due to cloud cover and several inches of snow and ice.
The cold has created extreme demand across the state. During most winter storms, the Panhandle, West Texas, and even North Texas around Dallas and above toward Paris may get cold but Central and South Texas could remain well above freezing. This has not happened during the current series of storms. The entire state is in a deep freeze, with snow appearing even on Galveston Island’s beach. Galveston averages lows of about 50 degrees and highs in the mid-60s during a typical February. It’s 37 degrees in Galveston as I write this, well below average. Austin has seen single-digit temperatures at night.
To put all of this into some perspective, the storm that dumped more than six inches of ice and snow on Austin Sunday night would, by itself, have been a historic storm. It dropped more snow on the capital than any other storm since 1949. It was preceded by a major cold snap and has been followed by more extreme cold and then another ice and snow storm Tuesday night. Texas has not suffered a single historic winter storm over the past several days, but a series of them without any warming in between…
Add to all of this, when Texas gets winter storms it usually doesn’t just get snow. Snow is fairly easy to deal with. Texas also gets ice, which can snap electric lines and break trees and tree branches, which also can fall on and break power lines. A tree in my yard is bent over by ice to the point that it looks like an invisible hand is holding it down. We can expect the ice to kill off millions of trees around the state. The ice layers also render most roads impassable. All of this is very unusual for Texas, but not unprecedented. The winter of 1836 was notably harsh; Santa Anna reportedly encountered deep snow as he marched his army toward San Antonio.
Most winters, Austin will have a few cold days but no snow. Central Texas is known to go entire winters without anyone having to so much as scrape any frost off their car windshield. Austin has had two significant snowstorms in 2021, with the current one being historic by any measure.
Piecing known information together, the wind turbines in Western Texas froze up starting Friday before the icy snowstorm hit, on Sunday night to Monday morning. This destabilized the Texas grid ahead of the worst of the storm. The storm produced the temperatures and precipitation the forecasts expected, but with weakened power generation and demand skyrocketing to heat millions of homes, homes which for the most part are not insulated against the current level of cold temperatures, the grid was set up to suffer mightily as it’s not hardened against extreme cold such as this once-in-a-century storm series is delivering.
In chart form:
This sums up what you want to know about power shortages in #Texas! Timeline matters. Researchers must start from Feb 9. Have solar & wind failed? YES, starting Feb 9.
Have backup #natgas plants failed? Yes, starting Feb 14. Yet, Natgas generation still way higher than before pic.twitter.com/AKa6M0neZw
Wind’s share has tripled to about 25% since 2010 and accounted for 42% of power last week before the freeze set in. About half of Texans rely on electric pumps for heating, which liberals want to mandate everywhere. But the pumps use a lot of power in frigid weather. So while wind turbines were freezing, demand for power was surging.
California progressives long ago banished coal. But a heat wave last summer strained the state’s power grid as wind flagged and solar ebbed in the evenings. After imposing rolling blackouts, grid regulators resorted to importing coal power from Utah and running diesel emergency generators.
Liberals claim that prices of renewables and fossil fuels are now comparable, which may be true due to subsidies, but they are no free lunch, as this week’s energy emergency shows. The Biden Administration’s plan to banish fossil fuels is a greater existential threat to Americans than climate change.
Decades of taxpayer-funded subsidies that favor unreliable wind power are crowding reliable energy sources out of the market, weakening the grid, and leading directly to the blackouts we experienced last week.
It’s no surprise — in fact, Texas came close to seeing widespread blackouts in August 2019. Our reserve margin, the buffer of extra electricity between what Texans are using and what we can produce, has become steadily smaller in recent years. And without quick action by state leaders, it will only get worse.
We should eliminate subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies — especially unreliable wind— to allow the free market to function smoothly. We must prioritize reliability and affordability in our electricity choices. Unfortunately, that’s not politically popular. But these are steps we can and must take for our state’s future.
Austin’s useless City Council being their usual useless selves: “Austin Energy’s biomass power plant in East Texas, which the city purchased in 2019 for $460 million, sat idle and produced no power during one of the worst winter energy crises in state history.” Well, at least it was providing Austinites jobs? Nope. It’s near Nacogdoches.
Regular readers know that Austin has been climbing out of a once in a century winter storm that froze our roads and wrecked our power grid. Right now it’s still 19°F, but it’s supposed to warm up to a balmy 39°F this afternoon…
Could be worse: ERCOT says that their quick thinking to impose rotating blackouts prevented the physical destruction of the Texas Interconnect Grid. That may even be true, but it’s sort of like a teenager saying “Thanks to my quick thinking, I only managed to burn down the garage and not the entire house!”
Passage of this bill this year would lead to job losses and higher use of labor-reducing equipment and technology,” said Sean Kennedy, executive vice president for public affairs for the National Restaurant Association. “Nearly all restaurant operators say they will increase menu prices. But what is clear is that raising prices for consumers will not be enough for restaurants to absorb higher labor costs.”
But for the fact that he’s president — given his track record of having been wrong on every defense and foreign policy issue for almost five decades — it would be easy to ignore his assessment of China. This is a man who said in 2019, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.” He added, “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” Despite the difficulty of being wrong on both occasions Biden managed it.
Focus for a moment on what he said about the conversation with Xi. It is natural that China would be spending billions on transportation given the size of the country and the billions who inhabit it. Whether it is true that China is spending billions on climate change is another matter. It has, for decades, been spending billions on coal-fired electricity generation plants and has only recently made noises about reducing pollution.
But “climate change” is probably the last priority for China while it is spending far greater sums on its military and cyberwar capabilities. Xi was clearly trying to gull Biden into some sort of race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that we could strangle our economy while China doesn’t do the same to its own. China may well be trying to reduce pollution — Beijing is infamous for its barely breathable brown air — but how much it is really doing remains to be seen.
Biden apparently wants to be known as the “climate change president.” If Xi can increase Biden’s desire to make climate change his top priority for legislation and regulation (which seems altogether likely in any event) China will be greatly advantaged by Biden’s concomitant reductions in spending on the U.S. military and intelligence communities.
To say that Biden is soft on China only proves the speaker’s command of the obvious.
What Tenev did not say, or explain, is why his company – which is merely a client-facing front of Citadel, which buys the bulk of Robinhood’s orderflow to use it perfectly legally in any way it sees fit – was so massively undercapitalized that the DTCC required several billion more in collateral to protect Robinhood’s own investors against the company’s predatory ways of seeking to capitalize on the gamification of investing making it nothing more (or less) than a trivial pursuit to millions of GenZ and millennial investors, a point which Michael Burry made so vividly.
The #mainstreetrevolution is a myth. Zero commissions and gamified apps were designed to feed flows to the two most influential WS trading houses. A few HFs got hurt, but if retail is moving toward more trading and away from fundamentals, WS owns that game. #Stonks by design. https://t.co/Y4raF0jiM3
— Cassandra (@michaeljburry) February 9, 2021
Incidentally we know why Tenev did not mention it: it’s because Robinhood’s back office is a shambles of a shoestring operation, one which never anticipated either such a surge in trading not a multi-billion collateral requirement; had Robinhood been a true brokerage instead of pretending to be one, and run merely to open as many retail accounts as it could in the shortest amount of time, thus generating the most profit in the quickest amount of time to allow its sponsors a quick and profitable exit, it would actually have been on top of this.
SpaceX wants to bring fast satellite broadband internet to the world — and in particular, to internet users in far-flung, rural locations, where download speeds are low and prices are high.
One of the first places in America to get SpaceX Starlink service was Alaska, the state with the lowest population density in the country — just one person per square mile. The company next extended service into Canada (population density: three people per square mile), followed last month by service in the UK — a big jump in concentration, with 650 people per square mile. (Even in the UK, there are plenty of isolated locations where internet service is expensive, slow — or both).
SpaceX’s globe-spanning satellite constellation should be capable of providing 100 megabit-per-second internet service to anywhere by the end of this year. You can expect that a lot of countries, no matter how urbanized they are (or not), will be lining up to sign up for Starlink service. And the more countries Starlink signs up as customers, the better the prospects for the SpaceX subsidiary’s promised IPO.
One country that most definitely does not want Starlink, however, is Russia.
Snip.
As Ars points out, “Russia is planning its own satellite Internet constellation, known as ‘Sphere.'” And in contrast to SpaceX’s Starlink, which is a privately funded and privately built communications system, the 600-satellite Sphere constellation will be a project built and run by the Russian state under the aegis of its Roscosmos space agency. And that could be a problem.
Sphere, you see, is rumored to cost $20 billion to build, may not begin launching until 2024, and won’t be completed before 2030.
Those numbers alone tell you Sphere will never be built, Starlink or no Starlink. Russia is a profoundly broke and profoundly broken country. Sphere is just the sort of prestige project Putin loves to announce to much fanfare, national greatness vaporware that either never gets built or else creeps out into the real world years (or even decades) late and in much-reduced form, like only ordering 100 T-14 Armata tanks.
Iranian fuel tanker convoy to Afghanistan goes boom.
The media want you to know that it’s Trump’s fault they couldn’t investigate such trivial scandals as Lincoln Project pedophiles, because how would they have time when Orange Man Bad?
Speaking of the Lincoln Project, founder Rick Wilson managed to pay off his mortgage early just as the John Weaver pedophilia scandal was breaking. How fortuitous!
Back in The Before Time, The Long Long Ago, newspapers actually defended free speech.
Back in 1977, the New York Times maintained that as long as Nazis did not engage in any illegality, they were “entitled” to the protection of the law, and then put the onus of maintaining peace on the Skokie residents:
The argument that they will provoke violence simply by appearing on the streets of Skokie only emphasizes the obligation of the police to keep the peace—and gives an opportunity the people of Skokie to demonstrate their respect for the law.
These days, the Times board will chase you out of the building for allowing anyone to voice an opinion that chafes against the brittle sensitivities of its writers. The paper employs full-time speech monitors to vet wrongthink.
The cancel mob comes for Baen Books. Book editors and writers kindly tell them to get stuffed.
Special for Black History Month:
Here are the names of the 200+ slaves owned by Kamala Harris’ ancestor Hamilton Brown in Jamaica in 1817. One of the largest planters in Jamaica, Brown now has a town named after him, Brown’s Town pic.twitter.com/6QnBpEQyez
Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg told employees they need to “inflict pain” on Apple because Apple won’t let Facebook steal every single bit of personal data from Apple devices.
“Bill Gates Bankrolling Educational Organization That Says Math is Racist.” “A conglomerate of 25 educational organizations called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction asserts that asking students to find the correct answer is an ‘inherently racist practice.’ The organization’s website lists the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its only donor.” How many fingers, Winston?
A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical made from fossil fuels onto a wind turbine made with fossils fuels during an ice storm is awesome. pic.twitter.com/3HInc2qKb9
“Man Asks That You Respect His Preferred Adjectives.” “‘Here are the adjectives I identify with,’ Becker put on social media. ‘Cool, witty, handsome, innovative, fun.’ Please use one of these adjectives when describing me. It distresses me when people use adjectives I don’t identify as,’ Becker later explained. ‘Like “creepy,” “weird,” or “off-putting.” That’s basically denying my existence and trying to genocide me.'”
I reached out to the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s energy expert Katie Tahuahua about the dire energy problems brought about by the huge winter storm, here are her answers:
1. The Texas Interconnect Grid is a separate grid from the U.S. Eastern and Western Interconnect grids. What advantages and disadvantages does this provide for Texas energy consumers?
KT: The advantage of Texas having its own electric grid is that our communities aren’t affected by poor policy choices in other states we have no control or accountability over. However, it also means we must bear the full costs of our choices and feel the full brunt of crises like the blackouts across the state this week.
2. What role does ERCOT serve in managing the Texas Interconnect grid?
KT: The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the Texas Interconnection Grid — although, unfortunately, the “Reliability” in its name has now been called into question.
3. The current wave of extreme cold was forecast in advance. Why were so many electricity-producing entities caught off-guard?
KT: There are two problems here. The first is that ERCOT waited too long to initiate conservation measures to meet increased demand as the weather turned colder. However, this delay wouldn’t have been a problem at all had Texas not put so many eggs in the renewable basket. Instead of adding more reliable fossil fuel generation to the grid over the last few years to keep up with our growing population and electricity demand, we’ve closed over 3,000MW in natural gas and clean coal and instead added 20,000MW of unreliable wind and solar to the grid. Unfortunately, all that wind and solar was barely generating when Texans needed it most. By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid and total wind generation bottomed out at 2% capacity by Monday night. Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts — inconvenient but manageable — instead turned into millions of Texans left in the cold and without answers.
4. What, if any, role has ERCOT’s demand pricing policies played in helping create the current crisis?
KT: ERCOT does not currently have demand pricing policies. While voluntary demand pricing programs could help prevent situations like this, any regulatory solution should place the cost of ensuring reliable electricity on the generators where it belongs, not on the customers.
5. A great number of Austin households are without power right now. Has Austin energy performed notably worse than other government power entities, and what policies have contributed to making the situation worse?
KT: Anecdotally, we know that there are communities in several areas of the state still without power. It does not appear that the blackouts are worse in Austin than anywhere else. However, Austin’s boisterous promotion of unreliable renewable energy — and their expensive failed efforts to use it — have reduced reliability for their customers and for the broader Texas grid. Unfortunately, San Antonio and CPS Energy are going down the same path that will put their ratepayers on the hook for $1 billion and further jeopardize the security of our grid.
6. How much, if any, has the push for “renewable” energy courses like wind and solar contributed to the current energy difficulties in Texas?
KT: It’s clear that policy decisions favoring unreliable wind and solar energy made blackouts such as this inevitable at some point. The severity of this blackout could have been reduced had ERCOT acted more swiftly — but it never would have been an issue had our grid not been so deeply penetrated by unreliable energy sources that contribute the least when they are needed the most, yet are propped up by billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies every year.
The Texas Legislature should end these subsidies and require all electric generators to guarantee a certain amount of “dispatchable,” or readily available, power to the grid at all times. The Texas Public Policy Foundation and our Life:Powered initiative will be working closely with the legislature to preserve Texans’ access to affordable, reliable electricity no matter the weather.
Thanks to Katie Tahuahua for taking the time to answer these questions.
Today is the first time in almost a week that the temperature is going to get above freezing…
The University of Texas at Austin is closed through 8 a.m. Wednesday.
Austin Energy is performing rolling blackouts to conserve power. The electricity provider, which has more than 500,000 customers, instituted the measure as a “last resort to preserve the reliability of the electric system as a whole,” the city said in a statement. The outages typically last 10 to 40 minutes but were lasting longer than expected as of early morning Dec. 15, Austin Energy tweeted. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has asked utilities around the state to use rotating outages to lessen the strain on the state’s power grid.
Many flights are canceled. Austin-Bergstrom International Airport officials urged travelers to confirm their flight status if flying in the next 48 hours. The airport also announced that Security Checkpoint 1 is closed and all passengers will be screened through Security Checkpoint 2. According to FlightAware, 138 flights into or out of ABIA had been canceled as of 8 a.m. Feb. 15. In addition, many roads around the airport have been closed because of ice.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the Texas Interconnect Grid, reports that the grid is near capacity and rolling blackouts may last some time. My power hasn’t gone out here since it was restored Friday morning.
You don’t even need to tell Austin drivers to stay out of this stuff. If you look at the traffic cams, the roads are empty.
Yesterday HEB reported that it was running out of items and closing early, and even if it’s open today, it’s on a reduced schedule. The local HEB phone number just rings, so I wouldn’t count on any of them being open.
I imagine that almost all restaurants are closed (here’s an outdated list). No answer at the Jim’s and Denny’s locations I called. I even tried calling all three local Waffle Houses to see if any were open, and all three calls went to voicemail.
Truly the end times are upon us.
I’ll give you more first hand info when I walk the dogs later.
Stay warm…
Update: There are reportedly almost 2 million people without power across Texas this morning.
Update 8: Pflugerville is under a boil water notice:
Due to a prolonged power outage at the water treatment plant, Pflugerville is under a boil water notice. We are working with Oncor to restore power, but until further notice, all city water customers must boil their water prior to consumption. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/alhpeSfyaN
Daniel Gross on Slate and Mickey Kaus on his campaign website (he’s running against incumbent Barbara Boxer for the California Democratic Senate nomination) ruminate on why the Texas economy is so much more resilient than that of most states. Gross points out that Texas has successfully globalized our economy, that energy is more resistant to recessions than most industries, that high tech plays a bigger role than crude oil, and that the independent nature of the Texas Interconnect Grid meant Texas was able to deregulate its energy sector without having to play “mother may I” with the feds. Kaus argues that since Texas is a Right-to-Work state, we don’t have unreasonably powerful public sector unions to drive up budgets, and the lack of rigid work rules results in a more dynamic economy. All of which is true. However, being from the left, Gross and Kaus both miss one of the biggest reasons for Texas’ economic success:
Texas has no state income tax.
People want to move to Texas (and people already here want to stay) because we get to keep more of our own money. Not only does this make our economy more resilient during downturns, but it limits the size and scope of state government. Numerous studies have shown that high earners flee high-tax states for low-tax states. California and New Jersey’s loss is Texas’ gain. There’s a reason blue states are the ones hit hardest by the recession.
Liberals never bring this up because, well, big government and high taxes go hand in hand, and love of big government and its redistributionist policies are all the left have left these days. Even relatively sane anti-New Left liberals like Kaus want to believe that bigger government can improve people’s lives with the right reforms/cost controls/etc., which is why he favored the abomination that is ObamaCare.
Clueless liberals have been calling for a state income tax for decades. Indeed, when you see a newspaper editorial headlined with “Texas Needs a More [Equitable/Fair/Robust/Just] Tax System,” when you read it you see that what they want is an income tax, and what they really want is bigger government. It’s no wonder that when you look at the board of the pro-state income tax group Citizens for Tax Justice, their guiding board is filled with union cronies. State income taxes mean more money for public employee unions, which is why unions always push for higher taxes. (Are you reading, Mickey?)
Here’s a handy breakdown of the differences between California and Texas. Note that it only covers up to 2007; since then, the economic and budgetary picture for California has only deteriorated.
Despite liberal contention to the contrary, it is low tax states that have low budget deficits, and high tax states that have the largest problems, and the lack of a state income tax is a big contributing factor to state budget discipline. That’s unlikely to change, even when the current recession ends.
Interesting article on why Texas might decline to participate in that proposed interconnect grid. If we did participate, we might have to give up independent oversight to various federal bureaucracies.
The article contains a couple of notable ironies:
Because there’s only one regulatory commission to deal with, it’s much easier to get “alternative energy” (solar, wind, etc.) projects approved. Never mind that a goodly portion* of the alt-energy crowd are in favor of greater regulation of just about everything, a short-sighted strategy on par with their disdain for nuclear power.
Because of that lack of federal red tape, some heavyweight corporate sponsors (Intel, Microsoft, etc.) have gotten together to put together a think-tank in…the notoriously pro-regulation environs of Austin.
*Not all. I have one friend who drives a Honda hybrid, and another whose car is fueled by liquefied natural gas (a vehicle we cheerfully refer to as “the Hindenburg”), both of whom are small-government, pro-gun, pro-nuclear types.
