“Smart rifle” technology seems to have finally arrived in the form of an “AI” enhanced scope that still requires you to pull the trigger, but picks the optimal time to actually fire to take out drones.
“High-tech, often AI powered scopes are something every major military has been working on for the past few years with more failures than successes. The [Smash] 2000L is arguably the most developed such system in existence. However, given the laughably poor records high-tech scopes have, it’s valid to ask if this new system currently in the process of testing and adoption with the US Marine Corps, the UK, Australia, and other countries, is actually worth the hype.”
It only works against small drones because, you know, rifle. “The drones of the Smash 2000L system are designed to take out a roughly the size of a DJI Mavic drone, a system used by both Ukraine and Russia before DJI blocked all exports to both countries, after which both sides continue to produce very similar drones domestically. This drone and other comparable designs are actually among the most used drones in the war, with either side launching around 10,000 of them every single month. That makes them the exact type of threat the Smash 2000L was designed to counter.”
“The Mavic E3 drone measures [roughly] 14 by 11 inches with a height of barely [4] inches. This makes it roughly the size of a large Domino’s pizza.”
“They’re capable of reaching and exceeding speeds of roughly 50 [miles] an hour. Some of them are even capable of doubling that.”
“Drones rarely operate individually. Swarm attacks are most effective as they guarantee results.”
“From February 2022 to today, Ukraine went from domestically producing a total of about 3,000 drones per year to being capable of producing 5 million of them. Russian figures are similar at around 3 and a half million drones a year.” I would like to know where these figures are coming from.
“The obvious solution is just jamming the living shit out of everything. Although autonomous drones are gaining ground in warfare nowadays, most drones are still operated in real time by an operator. That operator communicates with the drone via a radio link and by jamming that link, essentially flooding it with radio frequency, the drone is cut off from its operator. The jammers themselves exist in the form of rifles. One of which famously made an appearance at the funeral of Pope Francis in 2025, the
very first time such a weapon was fielded at a papal funeral.”
Skipping over the jamming/fiber optic drone arms race we’ve covered before.
“Large and small surface-to-air missiles were launched, depending on the size of the approaching drone, and even other drones were used to take down drones.”
“However, the last ditch option for a soldier to use is their own primary firearm. And this is exceptionally difficult for a number of reasons. To take down a drone with their own assault rifle, a soldier who is high on adrenaline and reasonably afraid for their safety, has to hit a target roughly the size of a volleyball at a distance of between 50 and 200 meters as it buzzes around erratically at highway speeds. And they have to do that with a projectile that’s 5.56 or 7.62 mm in diameter.
“Because of this, both Russian and Ukrainian infantry squads have adopted shotguns as their go-to last ditch anti-drone firearm.”
“Shotguns have proven to be much more effective against drones as a last resort, which is why some manufacturers like Benelli have developed anti-drone shotguns with special ammunition.”
“Ukraine has also developed a special 5.56 anti-drone rounds that fires several sub projectiles instead of a solid bullet. The soldier still needs to fire five or six rounds while tracking the target, but the round is far more effective than standard ammunition because of its shotgun principle.”
The main problem is that shooting at drones that are trying to kill you is highly stressful, and accuracy suffers. “Aiming perfectly in such a stressful scenario is just borderline impossible, no matter how accurate you are. And this, of course, is where the Smash 2000L comes in.”
“The idea behind Smash is very simple. Turn every soldier into a sharpshooter. Smash is essentially a very advanced scope that can be installed on most firearms, and it’s allegedly capable of hitting targets, even very small moving targets like drones, with a 95% hit probability. For comparison, experienced shooters using red dot sites at a distance of about 100 m average a 20% hit rate.”
“With a Smash 2000L, even trainees average an 80% hit rate, with experienced shooters reaching the aforementioned 95%. Which is really pretty impressive.”
“Smash consists of a digital camera with an attached display that’s seen by the shooter, a trigger guard, and most importantly, a computer. That computer does all the work. It locks onto a target, analyzes its speed, heading, distance, and environmental conditions such as wind and humidity to estimate the best time for a soldier to take a shot. When it locks onto a target, Smash tracks it until it calculates the best time to shoot.”
“As long as the computer estimates that the hit probability is low, it will block the trigger using the trigger guard. The shooter presses their finger against the trigger, even though it’s blocked. And when the shooter takes aim at the very specific spot on the target, which the computer deems the highest hit probability spot, the computer unlocks the trigger guard, the trigger is pulled and a drone is shot out of the sky.”
“The shooter can also wait for the computer to unblock the trigger before pulling it. But the high hit probability time window is of course very short when it comes to fast flying drones. That’s why it’s easier for the shooter to keep pressing the trigger the whole time and simply wait for the computer to unblock it at the appropriate moment.”
“When testing in the United States, Smash took down loitering drones surprisingly casually. Fast moving drones are likely going to be more difficult, but certainly not impossible and certainly much easier to hit with Smash than without it.”
“The system can also be used to eliminate ground targets such as other infantry troops, and even more easily at that. In that mode, it’s accurate up to 300 m or close to 1,000 ft during the day, while the small drone elimination mode is accurate up to 100 m or around 300 ft in both day and night.”
“Aside from just destroying small drones, Smash is also marketed as being capable of destroying micro drones. These drones are usually used for reconnaissance, not direct attacks, and they’re sometimes so small that they can fit in the palm of your hand.” Like the super-tiny, super-expensive Black Hornet drone.
“The Smash system itself can also fit in the palm of your hand. It weighs 740 g or 26 oz and is smaller than most magnification scopes, with a battery capable of running for 72 hours before needing recharging.”
“Smash is a line of sight system, which means that you have to be able to see the enemy for it to track the enemy. That means a couple of things. For one, you need to expose yourself at least a little bit for Smash to do its job. And secondly, Smash can’t track an enemy behind cover. It can’t see through walls. This also means it’s impossible for the shooter to aim from thick brush, for example, as there’s no way for Smash to get around that.”
“With this in mind, Smart Shooter came up with an addition to the Smash 2000L in the shape of the Smash Hopper 5000, a remote control weapon station, and another thing with a fantastic, very 1990scoded name. A soldier who prefers not to expose themselves to the enemy can mount their rifle with its 2000L system attached on the Hopper 5000 and control it from the safety of cover.”
“The system weighs a substantial 25 kilos or 55 lbs. It’s clunky, takes a while to set up, and it can never have the maneuverability of a soldier.”
“Does the Smash 2000L completely solve the drone problem? No, absolutely not. But it is a step in the right direction, isn’t it? Accuracy and speed of aiming are the biggest hurdles an infantryman has to tackle when shooting down a drone with their firearm. And Smash is essentially just a
system that does that job much more accurately and almost instantly.”
The IDF tried it with only one rifleman per squad. First problem? “Blue-on-blue incidents.”
“At the time of its introduction, the system could not tell the difference between friendly and enemy combatants.”
“Aside from the IDF, the Smash 2000L was purchased by the US primarily to be used by the Marine Corps, as well as the Netherlands, India, Germany, and the United Kingdom.”
“The Israeli manufacturer has since secured a $10.7 million contract with the US Army, making it the second service branch to join the program.
All well and good, but there were many previous “smart” scopes that didn’t work out.”
“Another one of those optic systems that came out of Israel is Arcus, an acronym for Assault Rifle Combat Application, developed by Elbert Systems. The system consists of an eyepiece that the operator attaches to their helmet and wears at all times. The second part is installed on the rifle, essentially acting as an extension of the operator’s eye, providing a live feed from the gun’s point of view.”
“Arcus is capable of recognizing the human body shape and marking the target on the operator’s eyepiece. It can easily detect motion. It provides the operator with a range estimation, and the feed is transmitted to command headquarters at the same time, allowing everyone to see what the operator sees.” Shades of “network-centric warfare.”
“The system also controls fire in a similar way to the Smash 2000L and improves accuracy in the field. It even provides the operator with a built-in compass that essentially allows them to navigate without having to constantly check a map or GPS. The two modes of operation, thermal or electrooptic, allow the operator to use the system in both daytime and nighttime. I mean, it even has a shot counter to let the operator know when they’re low on ammo, which is very video game-esque. It is an absolutely perfect solution for a lot of real problems that infantrymen truly do face, and it could change the way the wars are fought.”
“And yet, nobody’s using it. Not even Israel is using it, let alone any other military. Five years after presenting Arcus and no one has even tried adopting it, with its biggest accomplishment so far being just reminding everyone of the target tracking system from Aliens.”
“The story is not much more positive with the United States’s next generation squad weapon program, which includes the XM157 fire control system.”
“When it comes to the XM157, the test results are disappointing. During testing in 2024, the fire control system received negative reviews from soldiers who used it. To be more specific, the 2024 report says that quote, “The XM7 with mounted XM157 demonstrated a low probability of completing one 72-hour wartime mission without incurring a critical failure.” Is it Windows based?
“It seems like after years of hyping up the next fire control system, the scope has simply gone missing and we’re not going to see it fielded anytime soon because it’s simply not reliable.”
Skipping over the Russian example, since they can’t even get their SAM systems to work right.
“So when we draw the line under AI assisted high-tech scopes,the result is not proportional to the hype surrounding them. Russia’s not using them. The US Army’s not using them, in spite of really really wanting to spend a ton of money promoting them in the news. And even Israel, which has been developing several types of these scopes, is only kind of using them, nowhere close to issuing them across the board to the entirety of the IDF. And this brings us the most obvious question that we’ve been building to this entire video. Are these devices, which are hailed in the media as the next big thing that’s going to revolutionize the way wars are fought, just an endless money pit?”
“Even if scopes such as the XM157 on the Smash 2000L were perfected tomorrow and all their software glitches and battery issues were ironed out, there are still three main issues regarding high-tech optics that are keeping them from becoming the norm.”
“The first two problems relate to doctrine. Over-reliance on technology can only take a soldier or a unit a certain distance before achieving the adverse effect and nullifying their fighting capabilities with old school equipment. At the same time, decision-making tools cannot be blindly trusted. Taking the Smash 2000 as a direct example, what happens if infantrymen start relying on AI to do the aiming and trigger pulling jobs for them too much? Well, the result is that a soldier is demoted from a shooting combatant to somebody who just broadly handles a weapon and points it in roughly the right direction, with the most important part of the job being carried out by the fire control system.” Given current U.S./NATO/Israeli doctrine, I don’t see this as a problem anytime soon.
I’m cutting out a lot of Whistler’s “whatbouts,” as I assume a competent system will allow switchback to manual targeting. Indeed, he reaches much the same conclusion. “Using traditional scopes or iron sights will remain the norm in doctrine, and AI powered scopes will be used sparingly, mostly for specialized tasks such as taking down drones or targets that are particularly difficult for a traditional optic to get an angle on.”
His next point is that sea-based automatic systems still make mistakes as well, and still produce friendly fire incidents.
His conclusion: “It is easy to see why high-tech optics will never fully replace the Mark1 eyeball. They will, mind you, be introduced in huge numbers, and military forces will most definitely find use for them, such as taking down anti-infantry drones, for example, but it’s extremely unlikely that they will become the standard infantry fire control system anytime soon.”
He may be right, but possibly not for the reasons he thinks, namely that ground-based drones will probably take over more and more (but not all) infantry-based functions as those are further developed, though I doubt they will entirely replace infantry (AKA, the Queen of Battle) any time soon.
I just want to note that these wonderscopes are not really AI as we’ve come to understand it, they are merely souped-up, shrunk-down targeting computers that we’ve had for a while. There’s no theoretical reason they can’t, it’s a question of when the system crosses the threshold of cost-effectiveness.
I have a whole lot of links saved up to do a Talarico round-up of all his various stupidities and attempts to walk back his social justice activism that I haven’t gotten around to posting yet. In the meantime, Texas Scorecard’s Sara Gonzales has her own roundup of Talarico trying to scrub his radical past. “But the Internet is forever.”
“Texas Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico is running from his past because he knows he can’t get elected in Texas if he tells the truth. So much so that he scrubbed his website when he announced his Senate run to remove references to trans kids.”
“There also was a place where he bragged about being committed to bold progressive legislation no matter how long it takes. Like it was right there front and center in his website. And then, curiously, in early September 2025, as he was announcing his Senate run, these sentences just poof, vanished out of nowhere.”
“It says the biggest divide in this country is not left to right, but top versus bottom. [snorts] Which first of all, I mean, the jokes write themselves, right? When you’re dealing with someone like James Talarico, who we all have some questions about his masculinity, is he like batting for the other team?”
“More importantly, the word progressive completely vanished from the website. You can’t find it.”
“Because the James Talarico is running today in 2026 is a total fraud. He is pretending to be something that he is not in order to trick Texans into electing him.”
“He is not just some regular old moderate just fighting back against the man. That’s not him. He is a radical, radical leftist.”
“We know that James Talarico, for instance, has never met a trans kid he doesn’t like. Actually, he’s seemingly obsessed with trans kids. But what you may not know, speaking of being a radical leftist, is that he also headlined a 2021 Pride event in Taylor, Texas with an 11-year-old drag queen that goes by the name Queen Kiki.”
“James Talarico is a big supporter of grown men dressed as women dancing provocatively in front of young children. James is also a big fan of sterilizing children. Actually, and I want to play you here. He is in his own words complaining that Texas Republicans passed SB14, which banned the trans surgeries for children.”
Talarico: “I think if I’m thinking through the three most dangerous LGBTQ, um, attack bills that made it through, I would say the most dangerous is SB14, which would deny many times life saving health care from our trans youth in Texas.” And by “life-saving” he means “gender mutilating.” He also opposed the bills banning drag shows for children and porn in school libraries.
“According to James Talarico, children should just have access to all of these gay books that talk about how, you know, uh, gay couples are like going down on each other performing oral sex.”
I’m skipping over bits about Talarico’s radical leftwing church since we covered that here.
“They’re housing illegal aliens to hide them from the federal law enforcement. They are obstructing. They are hiding illegals. They are hiding criminals from federal law enforcement so that they can’t get deported. That’s not a church, guys. That is a radical leftist cult.”
“He is a very dangerous radical.”
She didn’t even cover his assertion there being six genders and God being non-binary, or bragging about how his campaign was vegan…
A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the registration and approval requirements for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns in the National Firearms Act (NFA) are unconstitutional.
In the case of Silencer Shop Foundation v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), U.S. District Court Judge James Wesley Hendrix found that the requirements exceeded Congress’s constitutional authority once the NFA’s taxes on making or transferring those arms were eliminated. The taxes were reduced to zero last year.
The court found that the NFA, as enacted in 1934, passed constitutional muster as an act of Congress’s taxing power because the regulatory requirements—including registration, applications, ATF approval, fingerprinting, and related criminal penalties—aided the collection of NFA taxes.
This is in line with the 1937 U.S. Supreme Court case, Sonzinsky v. United States, in which the high court ruled the NFA is a legal exercise of Congress’s taxing authority. In that decision, the court found that the government could gather information on the owners of certain firearms and their accessories that were subject to the NFA’s $200 excise as part of the tax collection process.
Wednesday’s ruling in response to two consolidated cases—Jensen v. ATF, with Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF—in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, held that once Congress eliminated the taxes for suppressors, the constitutional foundation for registration was eliminated as well.
“In sum, the Court concludes that the challenged NFA provisions exceed Congress’s Article I enumerated powers and are therefore unconstitutional,” Hendrix’s ruling states.
On July 4, 2025, President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” reduced the NFA’s excise tax on suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and a category labeled “any other weapon” from $200 to $0. However, the items were still required to be registered under the NFA.
Machine guns and destructive devices are still subject to the $200 tax and its requirements. Under Hendrix’s ruling, the category “any other weapons” is still subject to the requirements even though it is not taxed.
The court has issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of the requirements for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns, but leaves them in place for the “any other weapons” category.
Hendrix stayed his decision for seven days to allow the government to appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The ruling itself is pretty interesting, as Judge Hendrix made clear he was ruling only on the constitutional issues that provide the injunctive relief sought by the plaintiffs.
With the NFA’s taxes now eliminated, each set of plaintiffs alleges that the NFA’s regulatory provisions for untaxed firearms exceed Congress’s Article I enumerated powers. They also claim that those same NFA provisions infringe the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear Arms.”
The Court agrees on the first point and need not reach the second. By zeroing out the transfer and making taxes for most NFA firearms, Congress eliminated the constitutional basis for the regulations that formerly supported the taxes for those firearms. No longer can the challenged NFA provisions be justified—as they have been for nearly 90 years—under Congress’s taxing power. See Sonzinsky v. United States, 300 U.S. 506 (1937). And because Congress enacted the challenged NFA provisions under the Taxing Clause only, the NFA cannot be retroactively justified under another power that Congress never invoked, such as its authority to regulate interstate commerce. See U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 3. Thus, the challenged NFA provisions exceed Congress’s enumerated powers.
That last part is fairly huge: Because Congress didn’t cite the Commerce Claus in setting up the NFA, it can’t defend it on that basis now that taxing provisions have been stripped away. Why, it’s almost as if congress can only pass laws based on enumerated constitutional powers.
Hendrix continues:
With that understanding, the Court accepts the plaintiffs’ invitation—offered at the motions hearing—to forgo adjudication of their Second Amendment claims. The Court does not decide constitutional questions unnecessarily, especially when the plaintiffs will receive no less relief than they would get for prevailing under the Second Amendment.
By not ruling on the Second Amendment claims, Hendrix does not foreclose additional challenges to the NFA on Second Amendment grounds.
Hendrix concludes his opening summary:
But to be clear: The challenged NFA provisions are unconstitutional. Congress’s choice to eliminate the transfer and making taxes matters, and the defendants cannot save the NFA’s regulatory scheme by referring to a power that Congress never invoked. Efforts to render the NFA constitutional must come from Congress, not this Court.
The downside for gun owners: Because congress did not eliminate the tax on machine guns and destructive devices, the lawsuit did not ask for relief on NFA regulations surrounding those still-taxed items. But I wonder if narrowing the justification of the NFA solely to taxation might not provide avenues for challenging those provisions of the act with no direct connection to that taxing purpose.
Here’s additional analysis from William Kirk of Washington Gun Law:
He covers most of the points above, but also goes into Hendrix’s discussion of “facial vs. as-applied” challenges to constitutionality. Not being a lawyer, this stuff is pretty murky to me (even murkier than “standing” or “ripeness”), so take a look at his discussion of that if you’re interested.
This ruling was a win for gun owners, though it is almost certain to be appealed, unless President Trump intervenes and orders the ATF not to appeal.
I also wonder if Hendrix’s ruling might provide the basis for a lawsuit to overturn the Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986. That’s the act that bars the transfer of any machine guns not already registered with the ATF to civilians. If the NFA is purely a taxing act, then it could be argued that barring new guns from being sold does not further the purpose of generating revenue for the U.S. Treasury.
Simon Whistler takes a look at why BUFF is eternal. That longevity is amazing, considering how many times the Air Force tried to cancel the B-52 project before it ever saw the light of day.
“Even though it’s the longest serving strategic bomber in the world with more than 70 years of service behind it, and despite the coming introduction of the brand new B-21 Raider, which will retire both the B-2 Spirit and the B-1B Lancer, the Stratofortress is nowhere near finished. The now ancient airframe was simply built to last. Thanks to its incredible capacity of modifications and upgrades, its impressive range, and its obscene weapons payload, the Stratofortress has outlived a dozen newer and technologically more advanced bombers.”
The plane’s legendary longevity is surprising because “the Air Force tried to cancel it about a dozen times before the first design was ever even drawn.”
“Fun fact that sounds insane today: The number of planes destroyed in World War II is bigger than the number of planes in existence today. German, British, and American bomber losses amounted to almost 40,000 aircraft. And that is only the bombers.”
“The Air Force wanted to replenish the numbers and improve capability because it really needed to be able to deliver the power of the sun to Soviet homes if it ever came down to that. This is where the B-52 Stratofortress came in. In November of 1945, the Air Force submitted a design request for a longrange bomber that could have an operating radius of 5,000 mi or 8,000 km at a speed of 300 mi or 480 km an hour and with a payload capacity of 10,000 lb or 4 1/2 tons.”
“Boeing initially submitted a straight wing design that weighed a fantastic 360,000 pounds or 160 tons, which checked all of the boxes except for the range, which was limited to 3,110 mi or just over 5,000 km. Nevertheless, it was the closest thing to what the Air Force was looking for. So, Boeing won the contract in 1946. Unbeknownst to Boeing, by signing that contract, the company was boarding a roller coaster of rejections and design changes.”
“Firstly, the Air Force didn’t like the size of the bomber. So, Boeing cut it down to 230,000 pounds, or 100 tons, and cut the number of engines from the original six to four. Just two months later, the Air Force said that a cruising speed of 400 m or 640 km an hour was imperative, which prompted Boeing to once again enlarge the design, now returning with a third 300,000 pound, 140 ton model.”
“A month after that, the Air Force was actively looking to give Boeing’s engineers design whiplash when it requested a ridiculous range of 12,000 mi or 19,000 km. This was an insane request at the time because no other bomber in the world could boast that kind of endurance or anything even close to it. The closest rival would only arrive in the mid-1950s in the shape of the Tupalev Tu-95, which is essentially the Soviet equivalent of the Stratofortress. Boeing, unsurprisingly, couldn’t meet such a requirement, but it could deliver a heavy bomber with extended range, one capable of using both conventional and nuclear weapons.”
“By the time Boeing agreed on this with the Air Force, however, it was already 1947 and almost two years had passed since the original request was submitted. The Air Force was now very close to introducing the Convair Peacemaker into its ranks. The general feeling was that if the Stratofortress couldn’t blow the leadership away with its range, it wouldn’t be useful at all, and it would most likely be obsolete and inferior to the Peacemaker before it was ever completed. Boeing was given a six-month grace period to figure out how to improve the Stratofortress, and the company returned with an improved design with an operating radius of 5,000 mi or 8,000 km, notably better than the Peacemakers.”
“Believe it or not, not even that redesign would satisfy the Air Force. While Boeing’s engineers were ripping their hair out, thinking it was all just a very elaborate prank, the Air Force gained independence from the Army and held its first heavy bombardment committee, where it evaluated all its programs. The committee concluded that speed was now as important as range. And the Air Force changed the characteristics for the millionth time, asking for a special purpose bomber with a range of 8,000 mi or almost 13,000 km, and capable of a cruise speed of 500 mi or just over 800 km an hour. The Air Force then tried to cancel Boeing’s contract, something that was only prevented because Boeing’s president personally protested to the Secretary of the Air Force, who caved in and didn’t rip up the contract.”
“Following that, the Air Force looked into alternatives such as a medium-sized bomber that would rely on mid-air refueling or flying wing designs. But it was ultimately decided that these avenues weren’t explored enough and therefore weren’t as reliable as a conventional bomber, extremely begrudgingly and to the disappointment of many within the Air Force. In March of 1948, two and a half years after the initial design request for a heavy bomber and seemingly a billion rejections later, Boeing was finally allowed to move into the second phase of development, which would include design, construction of two prototypes, and testing.”
“With that green light, the Air Force delivered its final set of demands. The gross weight of the bomber would not exceed 280,000 lb or 127 tons. The bomber should have a range of 6,900 mi or 11,000 km. and it should be able to carry 10,000 pounds of bombs*. Little did they know that the Stratofortress would not only fulfill but exceed all of those requirements.”
“The biggest design issue outside of the scope of the range, speed, and will it be made on time conversation was the engines. When the initial design request was first issued in 1945, the instruction was not to use jet engines because their high fuel consumption, much less efficient than that of modern jet engines, would limit the bombers’s range dramatically. However, since the Air Force decided to play ping pong with Boeing’s designs for almost 3 years, the technology had matured by 1948, and the thinking was now different. The Air Force asked Boeing’s engineers, who had submitted their last design without even thinking about jet engines, to now find a way to fit jet engines into their design.”
“The decision to use turbo jet engines and the process of figuring out how to fit them aboard happened over a weekend. Boeing’s representatives and engineers met with the Air Force’s representatives on Thursday, October the 21st, 1948 to hold one last meeting and agree on some specifications surrounding the Stratofortress when the Air Force dropped the turbo jet bomb on them. Boeing’s representatives retired to a hotel room for the weekend, and by Monday, they had a brand new bomber model and a 33-page report on the use of turbo jet engines. This would seal the B-52’s fate, as the report convinced the Air Force to greenlight the use of jet engines. The very first Stratofortress would have eight Pratt and Whitney J57 turbo jet engines propelling them forward. The first iteration of these engines, the J57P1W, provided the Stratofortress with 10,000 lb force each for a total of 80,000 lb force or 392 tons.”
“Aside from just powering the Stratofortress, the engines act as wing fences. Wing fences are objects fixed on the leading edge of wings, usually seen on swept wing aircraft such as the Stratofortress, which act as devices to prevent stall-related issues.”
” Aside from acting as wing fences, it was believed that the new jet engines could improve altitude and speed performance, eliminate some unresolved issues with propeller aerodynamics and control, and likely extend the Stratofortress’s operational life. And that last part, as it turns out, was right on the money, wasn’t it?”
“In 1949, it seemed like eight turbo jet engines would only give the Stratofortress a combat range of about 3100 mi or 5,000 km, which is less than half of what was promised. Because of that, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, General Fairchild, seriously considered cancelling the program while the first two prototypes were being built. Incredibly, the Air Force was now looking to cancel the Stratofortress for the nth time.”
“Boeing responded with yet another model of the aircraft. This one weighing 390,000 lb and with a range of almost 4,400 mi while promising that with coming upgrades of both the engines and the airframe, it would exceed 4,800 mi or 7,700 km. The Air Force accepted this proposition and this was, believe it or not, the very last attempt at cancelling the Stratofortress.”
Skipping over early production variants.
“When it comes to armament, Stratofortress can be configured for different mission sets. There are cruise missile carriers which can carry 12 missiles, with both conventional and thermonuclear warheads, with Boeing’s AGM86 air launch cruise missile being the go-to weapon of choice during the Stratofortresss’s glory days. Some bombers were modified to carry anti-ship missiles. Others carried air-to-ground missiles while more than 80 of the latest Stratofortress, the H variants, were modified to carry missiles in the bomb bay and release them from a rotary launcher. This is a technology that the USAF has since taken full advantage of and is currently introducing for transport plane.”
“When the last of the older variants was retired in the 1990s, the H variant of the Stratofortress went through a modification program to widen its weapons capabilities by adding modified underwing pylons. The B-52H could also carry anti-ship missiles and new generation weapons such as the JDAM equipped bombs, joint standoff glide bombs, and the joint air-to-surface standoff missile.”
“With time, however, the Stratofortress was removed from the list of aircraft capable of delivering nuclear gravity bombs due to its lack of stealth. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s a big airplane and it wasn’t exactly built to hide. Gravity bombs require a bomber to penetrate enemy airspace, ideally without being detected, and drop them from above. This would be a suicide mission for a Stratofortress in a modern combat environment, given that it sticks out like a sore thumb. Nevertheless, the Stratofortress is still very valuable because of its payload capacity. Although it can theoretically carry 70,000 or 32 tons of bombs, the realistic total is around 62,000 or 28 tons, which is on par with the B-2 Spirit. The only American bomber that seriously outperforms it is the B-1B Lancer, which can in theory by you, carry a payload of 125,000 pound. This has, however, never happened, as the aircraft would be extremely slow and difficult to maneuver with the Lancer more realistically maxing out at around 75,000 pounds.”
“Older variants carried the .50 caliber M3, but that was later changed for the 20mm M61 Vulcan rotary cannon.”
“A grand total of 744 Stratofortress were produced over the course of no more than 10 years, with the G variant being the most numerous, and only 72 H variant Stratofortress staying in service until this day. The reason they were produced in such huge numbers hides in the bombers’s performance and ease of maintenance.”
Skipping over most of the plane’s operational history, though I was surprised to learn that “15 Stratofortresses were shot down during Operation Linebacker 2” in the Vietnam War.
“During the aforementioned operation, two Stratofortresses were engaged by two MiG-21s which were a gift from the Soviet Union. Both MiGs were shot down by four .50 caliber machine guns located at the tail of the Stratofortresses, which makes the B-52 the largest aircraft to ever accomplish an air-to-air kill.”
“The G&H variants were modified to carry supersonic short-range nuclear missiles which replaced gravity bombs, as they simply weren’t an option any longer due to the aforementioned lack of stealth. This allowed them to attack targets without penetrating behind their defenses.”
“A new electro-optical viewing system was installed to make low altitude operations easier and safer for the pilots, with a new electronic countermeasure system improving the B-52’s self-defense capabilities. As Desert Storm started, B-52Gs flew from Louisiana to Iraq, destroyed around 90% of their targets, and returned home within a 35-hour window, which was the longest combat mission ever flown at the time. The B-52’s role was instrumental in the Gulf War, as it quite literally turned the lights out in Baghdad, and Iraqi troops have on several occasions surrendered after the strike, with the B-52 seen as a bringer of doom.”
“About 40% of all weapons dropped by coalition forces were dropped by American B-52s.”
“Later on, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the H variant would be the only one left standing as the G variant had to be destroyed in accordance with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a total of 365 remaining B-52s being torn into pieces.”
“The B-52 will stay until at least the 2040s, although many believe that it will reach the 100-year milestone before officially retiring. And now, after all this talk, we get to the core question of this video. How the hell is the Stratofortress, a bomber older than the Cuban Revolution, NASA, and the Civil Rights Movement, not only still in service, but actually about to become more important than ever, as it will be a one of the two bombers in the Air Force’s possession?”
The B-1 and B-2 are being replaced by the B-21 due to the former’s expensive operating costs. “The B-2 is notorious for how difficult it is to keep in its operational state. Its bleeding edge stealth technology is extremely demanding, and it requires environmentally controlled hangers, not to mention a trained team to take care of it all the time. Because of this, it can’t be deployed from forward airfields. And if an upgrade or a fix is needed, you can count on it being out of commission for several months, if not longer. The B-2 requires 60 maintenance hour per 1 hour of flight time, which is why its readiness rate in the early 2000s averaged a mere 30%. The B-52 averaged 80%.”
“The [B-1] Lancer story is similar. The development and production of this bomber was obscenely expensive to start with, and even the newest, most streamlined variants of the B-1B require about 48 maintenance hours per 1 hour of flight time. Not as bad as the B-2, but not much better either. The Lancer is also extremely expensive to operate, as a 12-hour mission sets the American taxpayer back about a million dollars, not including weapons costs. This is, believe it or not, about 14% cheaper than the B-2 flight costs.” Plus early B-1s had reliability issues, like “a cutting-edge radar jammer that, uh, jammed its own radar.”
“The reason the B-52 will survive the initial phase of the Air Force’s bomber fleet modernization is because it too is relatively inexpensive in comparison to its ability. It can carry anything from gravity bombs to hypersonic missiles, which makes the constant upgrades worth it. These upgrades and the fact that the Stratofortress is so modifiable are perhaps the most important reason the legendary bomber is still alive. This is a thread that you can trace all the way back to the beginning of the video and the story of the Stratofortress. Even before the first prototype was built, the B-52 was extremely modifiable, and this flexibility allows it to live on in a modern combat environment.”
“The airframe may be old, yes, but that’s the only old thing about it. Modern B-52s are equipped with modern electronic countermeasure systems and top-of-the-line communications technologies, which transmit and receive data the same way any other modern combat aircraft does. The Stratofortress has weapons capabilities that are also in line with new technology. The modern H variants was upgraded with a 66% increase in weapons payload, and it can carry eight 2,000lb JDAM bombs, cruise missiles, or decoy missiles internally.”
He also mentions the forthcoming engine upgrade, which I covered here. “Once these engines are installed, the new fleet will be designated the B-52J, which means [they are] nowhere close to retirement.”
“More than 700 Stratofortress were built over time, and there are only around 70 in active service today. This means that the Air Force’s engineers have access to a massive boneyard of spare parts, which they can use to keep the active B-52s flying for a very long time.”
The B-52 “has to fill a strategic hole in the Air Force’s plans. The B-21 Raider’s range and payload are incomparable with the B-52 at around 6,500 mi and a payload of around 30,000 lb. Sure, the newer bomber may be equipped with technology that was only imaginable in the realm of science fiction when the first Stratofortress was built, but the B-52 can deploy weapons from a standoff range without needing to penetrate enemy defenses. It can loiter for quite a long time, and it can deliver a massive munitions unimaginable to the new Raider.”
“Of course, with time, the Stratofortress will age out. That’s an inevitable certainty, because time beats everyone. For the foreseeable future though, the longest serving bomber of all time will keep flying because of just how efficient, powerful, modifiable, flexible, and above all enduring the design has proven to be over the last three-quarters of a century.”
*In one of the best transcription errors ever, YouTube’s automatic transcription rendered this as “£10,000 of bonds.”
Two pro-gun attorneys do a deepish dive into legal carry dos and don’ts near schools, and its pretty useful stuff.
“Can you legally carry a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school? Does a Texas License to Carry protect you under the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act? Can you carry while walking your child to the entrance—or must you remain inside your vehicle? Armed Attorneys Emily Taylor and Richard Hayes take a deep dive into Texas school carry laws and the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act. They explain the major differences between Texas LTC holders and non-license holders, where Texas law prohibits firearms, and what ‘school premises’ actually means under the Texas Penal Code.”
Richard Hayes: “And the place to find this law just as our framework is Texas Penal Code 46.03.A1. This is our school school sponsored activities.” Let’s quote that:
Places Weapons Prohibited
a)
A person commits an offense if the person intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly possesses or goes with a firearm, location-restricted knife, club, or prohibited weapon listed in Section 46.05 (Prohibited Weapons)(a):
(1)
on the premises of a school or postsecondary educational institution, on any grounds or building owned by and under the control of a school or postsecondary educational institution and on which an activity sponsored by the school or institution is being conducted, or in a passenger transportation vehicle of a school or postsecondary educational institution, whether the school or postsecondary educational institution is public or private, unless:
(A)
pursuant to written regulations or written authorization of the school or institution; or
(B)
the person possesses or goes with a concealed handgun that the person is licensed to carry under Subchapter H (Definitions), Chapter 411 (Department of Public Safety of the State of Texas), Government Code, and no other weapon to which this section applies, on the premises of a postsecondary educational institution, on any grounds or building owned by and under the control of the institution and on which an activity sponsored by the institution is being conducted, or in a passenger transportation vehicle of the institution;
“Postsecondary educational institution” is college, and they’re not going to get into campus carry stuff here, though they do note the laws are different between public and private, since private can completely ban carry if they want to.
RH: “Today we’re talking about K through 12 schools. And I think the first thing to point out here, we’re really talking about three places. Premises of a school, school sponsored activities, and then passenger transportation vehicles.”
RH: “It’s really, really important to hone in on [that exception], written authorization from the institution or somebody— Of, let’s say, the school board, or the principal or the superintendent, they can write, hey, this person is allowed to carry here.”
Emily Taylor: “If you think you can get written authorization, get it personalized to you and keep a snapshot of it, you know, on your person, if not the a copy of the actual document itself, just in case, because you don’t want to get arrested for that felony and have to prove it later. Getting arrested for a felony sucks and is expensive and they’re not giving you your bond money.”
They’re also not getting into the armed teacher’s etc. programs.
“The other word I want us to hone in on here is premises. And we define it and it means something really specific. In this section, premises means a building or a portion of a building. The term does not include any public or private driveway, street, sidewalk, or walkway, parking lot, parking garage, or other parking area. So, we’re talking about the building.”
ET: “This is again something that is very misunderstood. Most gun owners in Texas don’t realize you can carry, I mean, frankly, open or concealed, although open carry in this situation is going to get you a lot of unwanted attention, but you can carry up to the doors of the school. you just cannot cross the threshold while you’re carrying unless you fall into an exception.”
ET: “Now, not only do most carriers not know that, but again, we have DA’s offices and local law enforcement who will threaten to arrest people for going through the school drop off and pickup line while armed. So, that’s not against the law, but lots of people read the statute and don’t bother to figure out what premises means.”
RH: “We do need to spend just a little bit of time on school sponsored activities. And there’s really three key components here that you need to be aware of. So it has to be in a location that’s owned and under the control of the school, and a school sponsored activity needs to be taking place in that location. So if it’s missing one of those prongs, okay, you have private property, school sponsored activity there. Hey, guess what? It doesn’t satisfy that requirement.”
But! RH: “Parking lot. Generally not going to be part of the premises. Not a big deal. But if a school sponsored activities taking place there, well now we have land, you know, a location that’s owned under the control of the school, an activity is taking place there, that falls into probably a prohibited place category. Yep. Band practice, field day, right. Something to that effect where it wouldn’t normally be prohibited because it’s not the premises, but all of a sudden you got a school sponsored activity. You’ve got to be prepared to disarm yourself in that situation.”
RH: “The other thing folks need to be aware of is the Federal Gun-Free School Zones Law passed out of the ’90s.”
RH: “Generally it’s illegal to possess or carry a firearm within 1,000 ft of the grounds of a school. So, we’re talking property line, not a building here, but I think the exceptions are kind of the key part here because, you know, there are some big exceptions.”
ET: “It does not apply to the possession of the firearm on private property, not part of the school grounds. So, if you live within 1,000 ft of the school, well, you’re accepted there.”
ET: “Another exception, and this is the one that covers, I think, most of us, is if you have a handgun license from the state in which the school sits. So, you’re in a Texas school zone, it’s got to be a Texas license. If you’re one of those people who likes to carry under a Florida non-resident license while you’re in Texas, doesn’t cover you there.”
RH: “If the firearm is unloaded and locked up. All right, so if you’re passing through the school zone, maybe this applies.”
RH: “And I think it’s worth noting here. Do we see people get prosecuted for violating federal gunfree school zone law by itself?”
ET: “No, I’ve never seen it.”
RH: “Usually it’s tied in connection with something else going om”
ET: “Drugs.”
RH: “And then if the school contracts with somebody, let’s say security guard or whatever. All right, that those folks are accepted. And then the last one is let’s say you’re on foot, not in a vehicle, and you’re passing through to get to hunting grounds. We have that as well.”
Breaking it down: ET: “License holders following the law. Non-license holders, not so much.”
RH: “So can a Texas license to carry holder carry within 1,000 ft of the grounds of a school?”
ET: “Yes, absolutely.”
RH: “The next one folks have is school pickup and drop off. Now there’s been a lot of controversy about this.”
ET: “The the best argument is still a failing argument, but the best argument the schools have when they try to prosecute you for such a thing is saying that the school pickup and drop off is a school sponsored activity. Uh, no.”
ET: “Where the school will try to get people is, let’s say you’re going through the line, you get out of your car to help your child into the car and they say, ‘Aha, I saw your gun for a second there. We’re going to call local law enforcement. We’re going to call the DA.”
ET: “We have we have negotiated those on the front end, and we have never ever seen someone— I think we saw we had one guy actually arrested and it was quickly dismissed. But for the most part, people call us, we start talking to them right on the front end and it’s like even the local DAs who were terrible will finally agree like, yeah, okay, I don’t think that was really a violation of law.”
Bigger school districts are the ones that seem to be trying to get lawful gun owners in trouble on technicalities.
ET: “I think we have one more sort of complicated issue that people ask about a lot which is what if my car is parked on the school grounds and is it different if I work at the school?”
RH: “The answer to that is no. And we actually have a very good law on this. So this is Texas Education Code 37.0815 and this is our transportation or storage of firearm and ammunition by license holder in a school parking area.”
ET: “This is for people who are employees of the school district. So long as they have a license to carry and so long as their vehicle is locked and inaccessible and the firearm is concealed in the vehicle, they cannot be fired for having a gun in the vehicle.”
RH: “And there’s three things to trigger this protection. The firearm has to be concealed. The vehicle has to be locked. And you have to have a license to carry.”
This seems like pretty useful stuff, as the State of Texas has provided lots of legal protections for LTC holders.
“During a Texas high school track meet, Karmelo Anthony, a 19-year-old student, and Austin Metcalf, 17-year-old student, got into a heated dispute after Karmelo entered Austin’s tent, which was like a rivalry school’s tent. An argument followed and then allegedly Karmelo said, “Touch me and see what happens.” And so Austin shoved him and Karmelo pulled a knife out. And yeah, Austin then passed away in his brother’s arms.”
“During the trial, jurors listened to witnesses accounts of the events, reviewed video evidence, and after a few days, the jury found Karmelo Anthony guilty and he was sentenced to 35 years in prison. And everyone accepted that outcome because they understand how the law works and they respect our justice system. Heh heh.”
Shouting black man on video: “Only good cracker is a dead cracker!”
“In this video, we are going to discuss the insane reactions to the Karmelo Anthony trial, read some tweets, watch some Tik Toks, as well as debunk a bunch of misinformation because I am just tired of seeing the same ridiculous regurgitated talking points, repeated ad nauseam by hundreds and thousands of people just believing it as gospel, hyping themselves up into a race war. No, I am not kidding. That is how bad it is getting.”
Random black tweeter: “White people are not victims of racism. You can’t be a victim of a system you created.”
Shoe0nHead: “Hey, 23-year-old white guy who can’t find a job and still lives with your parents. Did you know you created the entire system we’re in right now and therefore it’s totally acceptable to hate you and be racist towards you?”
Random black tweeter: “Only a black child can be minding their business, get ambushed, bullied, and pushed around and become the aggressor for protecting himself.”
Shoe0nHead: “He was quite literally not minding his own business. He was in a rivals team tent and was asked to leave like a dozen times. Witnesses say he started escalating it into a fight and then stab someone in the heart. That’s not minding your business.”
“His family raised like a million dollars on GoFundMe and then blew it all on a new house and fucking Cadillac. So then they had to get a public defender.”
“Do these people just live in a completely different reality? A guy gets put in prison for murder and they’re like, ‘Wow, what’s the point of even following the law anymore?'”
“It was the white son that was murdered. Why are they acting like the black son was murdered?”
“Literally, multiple witnesses, including black witnesses, including Karmelo’s own friends said that Karmelo was the aggressor in the situation. Also, just in general, murder is not the acceptable punishment for a shove, for a push. That’s not how that works.”
“Black people are held to a higher standard.” “In this case, the higher standard of do not stab people.”
“Where do these people live? Earth 2?”
“Every black defendant in every court everywhere is Carmelo* Anthony.” “Go do jury duty so you can go blindly support any black person regardless of what they did.”
“This was just straight up a black kid stabbed a white kid and they’re losing their minds because he’s going to prison over it. Fascinating.”
“Black people can’t be racist, stupid hoe.”
Perspective black jurors were excused because they admitted they would never vote to convict Anthony. Online leftwing blacks tell them to lie. “Get in there and lie to the court so you can free a person cuz he murdered a white guy. Incredible stuff.”
Responding to a BlueSky post: ” Oh my god, what has this country come to when a man can’t freely murder another man in cold blood and get away with it? Literally Jim Crow.”
BlueSky post with a pride flag thumbnail: “He saved himself from being lynched and now he has to spend decades in prison. Racist country.” “Huh? He was being lynched.” “Yes.” “Do these people live in the Netflix adaptation version of reality or something? What is going on? Stabby? Jail. No stabby? No jail.”
Rare normal poster: “Anyone defending Karmelo Anthony knows that they’re not defending him in good faith. Karmelo is obviously guilty of a murder that he intentionally instigated. Defending like this only hurts the black community. We need to hold ourselves accountable and hold ourselves to a higher standard.” “Oh my god! A normal person on BlueSky! Bro, what are you doing? Get out of there!”
Random black woman on video: “If we had segregation still, none of this would have happened. He wouldn’t have had no interactions with any white boy because we would have been in an all black school.” “We are going to reverse engineer segregation, aren’t we? But wokely. We don’t want those evil white people drinking out of the same water fountain as us. Am I right?”
Random sane black tweet: “I’m black. I haven’t stabbed anyone in the chest after being asked to leave a tent. I’m not in prison. I’m free. It’s not hard to not commit a crime.” Replies? ” You ain’t black.” “Because being black is supporting all black people everywhere, regardless of what they have done.”
Another random black Twitter loon: “Dig Austin Metcalf up and stab his ass again.”
“Apparently, a bunch of people on Tik Tok are doing the Austin bop where they dance to a song made about Austin Metcalf’s murder while reenacting the stabbing. They were also making AI photos of themselves pissing on Austin’s grave.”
“These people are freaks. Martin Luther King Jr. would be rolling in his grave looking at all this.”
More videos celebrating the death of Austin Metcalf and wishing death on his family. “This got so bad that people were actually going out and assaulting white people to get revenge. Obviously, I can’t show these videos, but there were multiple instances of this. These people live in a delusional alternate reality, and they’re becoming radicalized to take revenge for shit that isn’t even happening.”
“I got five boys. I don’t know what I ain’t got nothing to tell them no more.” “I don’t know. Not to kill people?…Nobody is hating Karmelo because he is black. They are hating Karmelo because he killed someone.”
“‘Remember when Shoe was a leftist?’ A yes, the famous leftist policy being pro-murder. I remember back when Shoe0nHead was pro murder. Silly me. How could I fall so far? Leftism isn’t about wealth inequality or workers rights. No, no. It’s about letting black people stab white people.” To be fair, this does seem to be the animating thought behind Soros-backed DAs, that no black person should ever be jailed for committing a crime, because racism. Or revolution.
“There were thousands and thousands of videos and tweets just like this. You probably get the point. These weren’t just like cherrypicked. The they were everywhere. But it wasn’t just Twitter nobodies and BlueSky nobodies. There was also sitting Congresspeople saying this insane shit.” Jasmine Crockett snippet sniped.
Shoe ends up pining for the 1990s. “I kind of feel like race relations were better back then cuz it was all like, ‘Oh, we don’t see color.’ And then they flipped it and they were like, ‘Actually, if you don’t see color, you’re racist. You have to acknowledge your white privilege and you’re a colonizer.'”
Yes, race relations in the 1990s were better, because that was before Obama brought in all his “racial healing.” A Democratic president could still have his “Sister Souljah” moment and stand up to the radical left wing of his own party and pursue policies that fought crime rather than encouraging it.
Precious few Democrats can do that anymore, because the Sister Souljahs make up the ideological core of the party. It’s Sister Souljah all the way down, and just about any Democrat officeholder will have to offer obsequious bows for offending the Party’s Souljah soul brigade.
White guilt has been weaponized by hard left social justice cadres, who are always on the lookout for their next George Floyd martyr to keep black people pulling the (D) lever every election. The entire ideological makeup of the Democrat Party is geared to cater to the “dead cracker” crowds and ensure that no Democrat running for nation office can ever have a Sister Souljah moment ever again…
*”Karmelo” is the correct spelling for the convicted murderer, but where tweets etc. got it wrong I’ve left them as posted.
There are some naked lies so offensive that profanity is valid response.
Such is the case with Minnesota Governor and failed Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz claiming that illegal alien pedophile rapist Tou Lue Vang shouldn’t have been deported because people shouldn’t be judged on their “worst day.”
I’m pretty sure lots of people can remember their worst days: They got in a car wreck, they got fired, they found out their wife has cancer, their dog died.
Raping a ten year old girl doesn’t qualify. “Honey, I got fired, wrecked the car, and, oh yeah, raped a ten year old girl on the way home. This day was the worst!”
Also, it wasn’t one day. Vang repeatedly raped his victim over several years. And it doesn’t seem like Vang thought it was his worst day, or he wouldn’t have kept doing it. Cue the Norm Macdonald:
Then there’s the sheer absurdity of the premise, as criminals are sentenced for a single heinous deed all the time. Should murderer Richard Speck be judged on his worst day, or do eight student nurses stabbed or strangled just count as a little “woopsie”? Charles Joseph Whitman’s Texas tower snipping spree? “Just a bad day, son, we’ll let it slide.” Julio Gonzalez killing 87 people by setting fire to the Happy Land Social Club? “Mistakes were made.”
It’s a sign of how badly social justice has morally deformed Democrats that Walz is willing to go to the mat to defend a pedophile child rapist afterhis evil, illegal alien rapist ass has already been deported. Bill Clinton would have deported him, then given a high minded speech about it before going off to nail another intern. Jimmy Carter would have deported him. Hell, LBJ might have just had him secretly shot and his body tossed into a ditch. Even Obama would have had him deported as the wrong kind of illegal alien. Biden wouldn’t have deported him, because Biden didn’t make policy decisions, so it would probably depend on which Obama holdover aide controlled the Autopen that day.
But all illegal aliens seem sacred to the modern, Marxist, social justice infected Democrats these days, because they’re convinced they provide a surefire path to the electoral promised land. And just as with communists in the Soviet Union, Democrats regard criminals as much more ideologically reliable allies than law-abiding citizens.
But even among Democrats, few are so tone-deaf and politically maladroit as to draw their line in the sand at deporting illegal alien child rapists. This isn’t an 80-20 issue, this is a 95-5 issue that should be used to hammer Walz and anyone foolish enough to defend his position. Every Democrat candidate in the country should be asked whether they agree with Walz that illegal alien child rapists should be shielded from deportation. ICE should be scouring criminal ranks for illegal alien child rapists to deport (honestly, they should have been doing this already). The likes of Kamala Harris and James Talarico should be asked again and again where they stand on deporting illegal alien child rapists. ICE should go to the California state capital, announce they’re deporting an illegal alien child rapist just to dare Gavin Newsom to pardon him the way Walz did with Vang.
Of all those “national conversation on [___]” Democrats claim they want to have, I’m pretty sure “Should we deport illegal alien child rapists” is the conversation they want to have least…
Here’s a heart-warming video about a German who moved to America to get married, only to discover most of what he thought he knew was wrong.
“Europe lied to me about America, but not in the way you think. Because I didn’t move here because I hated Germany. I moved here because I fell in love with an American. And two years later, I have to admit something that makes many of my old friends angry. Because the country I was taught to look down on made me more hopeful, more ambitious, and more free than I ever imagined. And that is uncomfortable because it means America was not the country I misunderstood.”
“Happy birthday, USA. The World Cup is happening here. And right now, Europeans are having the same moment I had two years ago. They arrive with jokes. They arrive with opinions. They arrive thinking they already understand America. And then normal America hits them in the face. Not Hollywood America, not political America, just normal America. And that is exactly what breaks the story Europe told. When I watch this World Cup tourists, I see myself two years ago. I see that moment where the America I was warned about disappeared. Two years ago, on July 1st, I moved from Germany to the United States of America. And I did not just move countries. I moved from a culture of caution into a culture of courage. And I was not ready for what would do that to me.”
“Germany gave me a lot. It gave me structure, discipline, education, a strong work ethic. And I’m very grateful for that. I am German. I still think like that in many ways. I still overanalyze things. I still want everything to be planned. I still get nervous when something is not organized. And sometimes I still look angry even when I’m having a great time.”
“But Germany also gave me something I had to unlearn. A voice in my head that said, ‘Be careful. Do not stand out. Do not dream too big. Do not be too proud. Do not risk too much. And definitely do not say America might actually be amazing.’ That voice was not always loud. It sounded reasonable. It sounded mature, but slowly it made my world smaller. And I did not even notice it until I moved here. That is what Europe does to a lot of people. It does not crush your dreams dramatically. It just makes them feel embarrassing.”
“You say you want to start something, people ask why. You say you want to move somewhere, people ask are you sure? You say you want to build a business. People explain the taxes. You say you want to start a YouTube channel. People say, “Who the hell is going to watch that?” And after hearing that long enough, you start doing it to yourself. You become your own German comment section in your head.”
“And then I came to America and America asked me questions I was not used to. Why not? Why not try? Why not build something? Why not start over? Why not you? These questions can change your life because in Europe people ask who gave you permission. In America the question is why haven’t you started yet? That is a completely different culture.”
“Europeans think America is loud because Americans are stupid. No, America is loud because America is still alive. Europeans think American optimism is fake. No. Maybe Europeans are just not used to people who still believe tomorrow can be better. And they also think American confidence is arrogance. No. Maybe they just forgot what courage looks like.”
“The first time I realized that America’s right was not some huge patriotic moment. It was in a store. One of my first days here, I was still full in German mode. I was overthinking everything. Where do I stand? Am I in someone’s way? Is my accent too strong? And then a random guy looked at me and said, “Hey man, how is it going?” And I froze because my German brain immediately thought, ‘Who’s this person? Does he want money? Is this a scam? Or is he just messing with me?’ No, he was just being nice. That sounds like nothing. But when you come from a place where strangers often treat each other like obstacles, that little moment becomes a big moment. It’s a culture shock.”
“Europeans say American friendliness is fake. I used to think that too. Now I think that sentence says more about Europe than about America. Because if warmth feels fake to you, maybe you have lived too long without it. Sometimes a smile is just a smile. Sometimes small talk is just kindness. Sometimes a compliment is not fake. Sometimes people are just trying to make life a little less miserable. And slowly that changed me.”
“I’m still German, so I will probably never become the guy who smiles for no reason all day long. But America made me warmer. I talk more to people now. I encourage people more. I say nice things when I think them. And that matters because a country where strangers are friendly creates a different kind of a person. And a country where everyone is suspicious of friendliness also creates a very specific kind of person.”
“That change did not stay small. It changed what I believed was possible. Before America, the idea of me having a YouTube channel was almost ridiculous. I started as a child. I’m an introvert. I’m not a natural performer. English is not my native language. I make a lot of mistake. I have a very strong accent. And I started at an age where many people in Germany already think, okay, this is your life now. You have your job. You have your routine. Do not do anything too weird. Do not embarrass yourself. When I first talked about doing YouTube, the German reaction were exactly what you expect. Bad idea, too risky. Nobody will watch that. And the most German reaction of all, what is the point? That sentence kills streams. What is the point? The point is to try. The point is to grow. The point is to see what happens. The point is not to die inside before you are dead.”
He tried doing YouTube is his native German first, but most comments from Germans were negative. “And then I had this crazy thought. What if I do it in English? A German guy with a German accent talking to Americans about America. That should not work. At least according to the European mindset. But America does not care if something should work. America cares if you’re willing to try. So I tried and Americans watched. Americans subscribed. Americans commented. Americans told me, ‘We like your perspective. We like your honesty. We like seeing our country through your eyes. And we actually like your accent.’ And now this channel has over 20,000 subscribers. It might be still small, but to me it’s actually insane because America gave me permission to try before I was perfect. And this explains America better than almost anything else. Europe often wants you perfect before you’re even allowed to try. Perfect education, perfect accent, perfect plan. America is different because it says start, build, fall down, try again.”
“But then I noticed something bigger. America feels alive. Europe often feels like a museum with regulations. Beautiful, historic, interesting, but very tired. And I know that sounds harsh, but I felt it in my own life. I had a good country, a good job, a safe environment. From the outside, everything looked stable. But inside, it felt like my future had already been assigned to me. Like the path was already written. Like the best thing I could do was not to mess it up.”
“America feels different from the beginning. America feels unfinished and that is the magic. America is still being built. That is why everything is loud. That is why people argue so much. That is why people move across the country and start businesses, take risks, fail and try again. Europe looks at that and says, “How embarrassing.” America looks at that and says, “At least he tried.” And that difference changed me.”
“And it also changed how I see freedom. In Germany, I always felt like freedom came with a warning label. You can speak your mind, but be careful. You can question things but be careful and after a while you start censoring yourself because freedom is not only what is written on paper. Freedom is also what the culture allows you to feel brave enough to do. Germany taught me freedom with a warning label. America taught me freedom with responsibility and responsibility can be very uncomfortable because freedom means you cannot always blame the state. You cannot always blame society. You have to choose. You have to risk. You have to live with the consequences. That changed me.”
“In Germany, I was used to thinking the state should handle everything. The state regulates, the state protects, the state decides. And of course, there’s comfort in that. But that comfort can become a cage. You pay huge taxes. You follow endless rules. You trust the system. And then one day, you wake up and realize this system is not building your dream. It is managing your decline.”
“I do not want a life that’s perfectly managed. I want a life that is actually mine. Europeans love to feel superior to America because it makes them feel sophisticated. But after living here, I realized that a lot of that superiority is insecurity. Because deep down many Europeans know America still has something Europe is losing. Energy, confidence, ambition, belief, the feeling that the future is still open.”
“Before I came here, I also thought maybe the best times were behind us. You work, you pay tax, you complain, you watch things get worse, you call it realism, and then you get older and you think that is just how it is. But America made me dream again. And I know many people will say that sounds naive. But I think it’s the opposite. I think giving up and calling it intelligence is the real stupidity. Optimism is not childish. Optimism is fuel. A country without optimism slowly dies. And America, even after 250 years, still has that fuel.”
“But the most unexpected change for me was patriotism. Growing up in Germany, patriotism is not normal. You are taught to be careful with national pride. You are taught to be suspicious of that.
Taught that loving your country too openly is dangerous. And that does something to you. It creates distance between you and your own home. You can love German food, German cars, German efficiency and German soccer. But loving Germany itself that is almost forbidden.”
“Then I came to America and I saw flux everywhere. At first I couldn’t process it. I thought, “Wow, Americans really love America.” But the longer I lived here, the more I understood the flag here is not just decoration. It’s a reminder. A reminder that this country was built by people who believe freedom was worth the risk. A reminder that a nation needs pride to survive. A reminder that gratitude matters. I still remember my first real Fourth of July here. People were wearing red, white, and blue. Flex everywhere. Families were together, fireworks at night, everyone just openly celebrated their country. And my first German instinct was, is this too much? But then I looked around and thought, no, maybe this is what a healthy country does. It remembers that is worth celebrating. That hit me. And strangely, America made me proud of Germany again. Because when I saw Americans love their country openly, I started asking myself, why am I not allowed to love mine?” I think we all know the answer to that question…
“America showed me that loving where you come from does not mean you hate anyone else. It means you are grateful.”
“Soon my son will be born here, a first generation American with a German father. And I will teach him to love America. Not in a fake way, in a real way. I want him to understand that this country is not normal. It is not normal to have this much freedom, this much opportunity, this much confidence, this much kindness from strangers, this much belief that tomorrow can be bigger than yesterday. Many people are born into that and never notice it. I had to cross an ocean to see it. And maybe that is why Americans 250th birthday means so much to me, because I was not born into this story. I choose it.”
“America is not love because it is perfect. America is love because it is possible. That is the word possible. In America, things still feel possible. You can arrive with an accent. You can start late. You can fail. You can change careers. You can build something weird. You can reinvent yourself. You can be nobody and still become somebody. That is why people keep coming. That is why people keep copying America.”
“America did not brainwash me. America unbrainwashed me. America gave me back something I did not even know I had lost. The belief that my life still can become bigger. So on America’s 250th birthday, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for changing me. Thank you for challenging me. Thank you for welcoming me. Thank you for making me braver.”
It’s a swell video.
To be fair to Germany, we can certainly think of times Germans were filled with optimism and patriotism, and it didn’t work out well for them…
250 years ago today: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Tonight we’ll be celebrating Independence Day by the time-honored method of blowing things up. In the meantime, enjoy these videos of things being blown up.
“Top 5 Biggest Firework Shells In The World Ever.” Not sure if that’s true, but they’re pretty big:
Our friends in Japan put on a fireworks show to celebrate our holiday:
🇺🇸 AMAZING! Japan just did a whole FIREWORKS SHOW celebrating America’s birthday today, as it’s now July 4 in Tokyo
Happy Independence Day Eve! We plan to celebrate America’s 250th Birthday tomorrow in the time-honored tradition: Blowing things up.
More Democrat welfare state fraud, dispatches from the Democrat Civil War, another very bad week for Russian logistics (and aircraft, and any Russians trying to buy fuel), Eurocrats want lowly peons to die of heatstroke rather than use the air conditioning enjoyed by their betters…
…a followup to the weird Plano ISD booster club story, plus Mexican Batman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Finally: “DOJ Grand Jury Probes Neville Roy Singham’s Marxist NGO Empire.”
Fox News’ Asra Nomani reports that on Monday, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is examining whether Singham, NGOs he funded, or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, or other financial crimes.
Prosecutors have issued subpoenas seeking bank records and other financial documents, according to Nomani’s sources.
Nomani’s team recently reported that Singham pumped $285 million through a Goldman Sachs donor-advised philanthropy fund and shell entities before it flowed into US nonprofits, while a broader review showed that $591 million flowed across five continents from 2017 through 2025.
More color from the report:
Of that money, Fox News Digital established a documented $278 million flowed directly from Singham into organizations that “sow discord” in the U.S., as House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith put it earlier this year at a hearing a dynamics called “foreign malign influence.”
Singham, who resides in China, has a long track record of assisting far-left entities, such as Code Pink and the Party for Socialism and other socialist NGOs, that oppose U.S. interests and support U.S. adversaries.
According to investigative reports (e.g., New York Times, 2023), Singham has worked closely with pro-CCP propaganda networks targeting the US.
Any Democrat or NGO staffers who knowingly accepted communist Chinese money need to go to prison.
“RFK Jr. Says 1 Million Obamacare Enrollees Lacked Social Security Numbers. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said 1 million people were enrolled in Obamacare health plans without Social Security numbers, as the Trump administration pledged to intensify efforts to combat fraud in federal health care programs.” Was ObamaCare designed from the ground up to provide taxpayer-funded medical care for illegal aliens, or did Democrats just see the opportunity along the way?
Finally Redux: “Supreme Court: States Can Ban Trans Athletes From Girls’ Sports.”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that states can block biological transgender males from competing in girls’ sports. In a 6-3 ruling, the court gave an iron-clad answer to the question.
Writing for the majority in West Virginia v. B.P.J. (consolidated with Little v. Hecox), Justice Brett Kavanaugh held that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause requires schools to carve out an exception for transgender athletes who’ve undergone hormone therapy or never experienced male puberty. States can draw the line at biological sex, full stop – no judge-administered athlete-by-athlete fairness hearings required. The ruling reverses both the Fourth Circuit (which sided with West Virginia’s B.P.J.) and the Ninth Circuit (which sided with Idaho’s Lindsay Hecox), and lands squarely in the wake of last year’s Skrmetti decision, extending its “this is a sex classification, not a transgender classification” framework from medical care straight into the locker room.
The transsexual madness gripping the left deserves its own chapter in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
“DOJ Sues States Over Alleged Failure To Turn Over Food Stamp Data. The Trump administration has sued four states, accusing them of withholding crucial data on food stamp applicants.” The only surprise is that California is not among them.
Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania refused to turn over information to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that would let federal officials identify fraud, Trump administration lawyers said in lawsuits filed on June 26 against the states.
Officials are asking judges to enter injunctions that would force state authorities to hand over the last five years of applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the food stamp program known as SNAP.
The USDA requested the SNAP data in 2025, citing an executive order from President Donald Trump that directed agencies to stop waste, fraud, and abuse, and many states complied with the request.
Data from those states showed that states had enrolled some 186,000 people in SNAP despite those people being deceased, among the discrepancies that added up to $3 billion in wasteful spending, the department said in a report.
We known Minnesota isn’t turning it over due to the massive fraud lining Democrat pockets, and the same is probably true in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Kentucky is pretty red, but Democrat Governor Andy Beshear must be doing his best to gear up the fraud there.
The Democratic Party has two main factions right now, which can conveniently be described as the Organized Crime Democrats, who view the government as primarily a vehicle to distribute resources and power to friends, allies, and clients who can be counted on to return their largesse with reliable votes, and the Bolsheviks, who want to do all those things as well, but whose overriding goal is the destruction of the United States and Western Civilization and replace it with Third World communism.
For decades, at least, the Organized Crime Democrats have dominated the party, but they have tolerated and even fostered the growth of the Bolsheviks with the mistaken belief that no group of clients can ever be more reliable than those who could not in a million years vote for the Republicans.
Snip.
The OCDs’ alliance with and fostering of the radical left has come back to bite them in the nether regions now. As their resources have become constrained, the Bolsheviks have become ever more powerful, and as is always the case, the revolutionaries despise their allies as much as their ideological opponents, and now feel ready to take them out.
And, so far, their putsch is working, and the OCDs are rightfully frightened.
I had previously reported on this civil war much earlier, but I used the terms “insane wing” and “corrupt wing.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Russian full shortages. “4km Line for Fuel in Russia’s Zabaykalsky Krai Region: 28 Hour Wait!” That’s all the way out east near Mongolia.
A JOINT PROJECT BY the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and the investigative website The Insider has uncovered the existence and inner workings of a previously unknown Russian intelligence and cover action unit. The unit’s formal name is Military Unit 75127, but it is known within Russia’s intelligence establishment as Center 795. The Russian government reportedly created the unit in December 2022—less than a year following the Kremlin’s full military invasion of Ukraine.
Snip.
Notably, unlike other special activities units in Russia’s intelligence arsenal, Center 795 does not appear to reside within the GRU. Instead, it appears to operate independently of military intelligence oversight and to report directly to General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff of and First Deputy Minister of Defense, or to one of his subordinate deputy defense ministers.
According to the investigative reports, the existence of Center 795 was revealed when one of its officers, Denis Alimov, used Google to translate a message sent to him by a Serbian operative living in the United States. This allowed the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation to use a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) warrant and access the Google Translate transcripts. Alimov was eventually arrested in Bogotá, Colombia, on February 24, 2026, after arriving there on a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul, Turkey. He is currently awaiting extradition to New York.
A Minnesota pardon board that includes Gov Tim Walz among its three members has issued a full pardon to a convicted Laotian child-molester, torpedoing Homeland Security’s effort to deport him. The 42-year-old convict, Tou Lue Vang, submitted a letter to the board saying he regretted what he did — and just like that, his criminal record is now clean as a whistle via unanimous decision.
“Governor Tim Walz’s decision to pardon an illegal alien convicted child rapist so he can remain in our country is disgusting,” said DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis. “These are the criminal illegal aliens he and his Minnesota sanctuary politicians are protecting. Tou Lue Vang lost his legal status following his conviction for repeatedly sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl.”
Find someone who loves you as much as Democrats love illegal alien child molesters…
The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave.
Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: ‘BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.’
The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners, and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.
Britons have been ordered to remove air conditioning from their homes – despite the country baking in up to 40C heat this week – under a fresh Net Zero crackdown.
Planning officials at councils have told residents to take down their cooling units over concerns about carbon dioxide emissions.
They say AC, despite the heat, should serve only as a ‘last resort’.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to disturb the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding a sweeping Texas election security law banning paid vote harvesting.
Senate Bill 1, passed in 2021, aimed to extensively reform election security and eliminate paid vote harvesting with increased criminal penalties for offenses.
Vote harvesting is the practice of collecting and returning completed ballots, which can be used as a cover for voter fraud and voter coercion. Paid harvesters are often intent on delivering results for a specific candidate or measure.
A source told Axios the DOJ started the investigation after a “whistleblower complaint” in Southern California.
Gallego’s problems began after numerous women came forward accusing his bestie, former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), of sexual misconduct.
In April, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) claimed, “There is a woman that allegedly is coming forward with attorneys, wants to go on-record about an incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time, and the event was sexual in nature, allegedly.
Last week, I wrote about how Politico scrutinized Gallego’s financial records and discovered he used leadership PAC campaign cash to fund luxury outings with his family since he launched his Senate campaign in 2023.
The Senate Ethics Committee dismissed an inquiry into those allegations against Gallego on Monday.
Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging California’s Plastics Act, arguing it imposes burdensome regulations on companies doing business with California and will increase the cost of everyday American products.
The lawsuit, which Paxton joined alongside the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and 16 additional attorneys general, calls the California law a “blatant and unprecedented attempt to impose its own policy preferences on the entire nation” and argues that it infringes on the sovereignty of other states.
Implemented May 1, “the Plastics Act” places new requirements on goods containing plastic shipped into and out of California, affecting both producers and consumers nationwide.
The act forces companies that sell products in the state to reduce single‑use plastic packaging, make it recyclable or compostable, and help pay for recycling and cleanup. It does this through strict reduction and recycling targets by 2032 and an extended producer responsibility program that shifts costs from taxpayers to packaging producers.
Paxton’s office expressed alarm that the regulations and fees will drive up prices for everyday goods and discriminate against out-of-state businesses.
“I am challenging California’s Plastics Act to protect businesses from unnecessary regulations and Texans from higher costs on the products they use every day,” said Paxton. “Texas has always been a place where businesses can thrive, and I will ensure it remains that way. I will not allow California lawmakers to harm Texas businesses.”
The lawsuit further challenges California’s decision to place the private organization Circular Action Alliance in charge of implementing the law.
According to the complaint, the CAA would collect roughly $500 million annually from businesses while operating with little public oversight or transparency.
So a left-wing, radical environmental NGO gets to benefit directly by running left-wing, radical environmental program. What are the odds?
The Supreme Court of Texas (SCOTX) determined on Friday that a woman who regretted her gender modification surgery did not file her claims too late to take her providers to court, in a case centered on the state’s statute of limitations in medical malpractice cases.
Soren Aldaco of Tarrant County sued her healthcare providers and counselors for fraud and negligence over their roles in obtaining gender modification procedures for her, including a double mastectomy at age 19 — a procedure she later came to regret.
After the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth rejected Aldaco’s appeal in November 2024 on the basis that her medical claim had expired, affirming the Tarrant County district court’s prior summary judgement, SCOTX accepted her petition for review and scheduled the case for oral arguments on February 11, 2026.
A SCOTX opinion was then issued by Justice James P. Sullivan four months later on Friday morning, reversing the finding that her claims had expired on the basis that the clock began ticking once the injury occurred, not when her therapist recommended her for the procedure.
Aldaco’s therapist, Barbara Rose Wood of the Three Oaks Counseling Group, wrote her a letter of recommendation for a double mastectomy after the Crane Clinic advised her that she would need one in order to move forward with the procedure.
Those who inflicted radical surgery on teenagers in the name of social justice deserve to lose every dime they own.
In response to lawmakers’ request for a pause on extra-high-voltage transmission lines, transmission service providers admitted reliance on wind and solar power, along with government intervention, is driving Permian Basin energy issues. This aligns with a third-party report that the lines are primarily built to support wind and solar, while local reliable generation alternatives were never fully examined.
Providers argued that public utility commissioners do not have the power to grant lawmakers’ request to pause the project. The next day, state senators announced they would hold a hearing on the proposed lines in late July.
This centers on ERCOT’s 765-kilovolt Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan (STEP), a key part of the Permian Basin Reliability Plan (PBRP). STEP proposes three transmission lines spanning over 1,200 miles to move power from East Texas into the natural-gas-rich Permian Basin, with routes crossing North Texas, Central Texas, and South Texas.
The three lines are split into five interconnected segments for Phase 1. Phase 2 would build 765-kV lines from Northeast-East Texas southward through Central and South Texas. This eastern portion would tie into the lines leading into the Permian Basin.
On June 24, in a joint filing, Transmission Service Providers (TSPs) Oncor, Lower Colorado River Authority Transmission Service Corporation, AEP Texas, and City of San Antonio-owned CPS Energy admitted that the risk to sustained electrical supply in West Texas is “greatest during low-wind, no-solar conditions, when the Permian Basin relies heavily on imports” from the lower voltage 345-kV network.
The TSPs’ filing was in response to a June 15 brief by more than 40 state lawmakers asking PUCT to pause the project. They filed it in support of pro-landowner American Stewards of Liberty’s motion to defer deciding the need for the first four segments.
The lawmakers cited Dr. Brent Bennett, who wrote the May 2026 study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Bennett warned that the “main effect of the 765-kV lines is to integrate more wind and solar into the ERCOT grid,” and that helping ERCOT “manage [such] a future system … to meet growing industrial demand” is the “primary rationale” for the lines.
This comes roughly five years after the 2021 winter blackouts. Two failures that energy specialist Jason Isaac said contributed to the problem are overreliance on “unreliable” wind and solar and market-distorting subsidies for wind and solar.
Bennett wrote that more transmission “does not ensure that enough new reliable generation will be built to meet demand and could even discourage such generation if the transmission provides wind and solar favorable market access.”
Bennett and ASL believe that building new dispatchable power generation, such as natural gas, in the Permian Basin was not fully examined as an alternative. The TSPs wrote they “do not dispute” that more such generation would benefit the Permian Basin.
When local taxpayers used cash, a tax office employee would put the cash in an envelope and record the payment as part of a “batch” of payments in the office’s tax collection software, Spindlemedia.
After reaching between $15,000 to $20,000, an employee would close that batch of payments in the software. At this point, Williams was responsible for depositing the cash from the envelopes into the district’s bank accounts.
Williams’ indictment alleges that she stole $996,174 in cash and disguised the theft by reversing payments recorded in certain batches, recorded those payments in new batches, and kept the new batches open for long periods in the Spindlemedia software.
Las Vegas cops busted a transgender gunman who allegedly planned a casino massacre using a huge cache of weapons.
Allison Howlett, 36, who was born a man but lives as a woman, was arrested Saturday on charges of making terroristic threats, assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, gun theft and other offenses.
The wild story unfolded shortly after 9:30 a.m. Saturday when Howlett’s former spouse, who is female, called police to report Howlett had stolen her car and the vehicle held numerous firearms, Henderson Police Chief Reggie Rader said.
You know how the MSM always report “arsenals” that seem like fairly puny gun collections? That isn’t the case this time.
The officers were shocked to see that Howlett had been sitting on a handgun and had an MP5 submachine gun sitting on the back seat.
When cops searched Howlett’s car, they recovered 22 other guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Cops who searched the suspect’s home in Henderson found 30 more firearms, including automatic rifles, plus ammo, grenade launcher attachments and silencers.
Officers said Howlett made several threats going back years, a including a 2024 call where Howlett threatened a mass shooting.
Here’s a weird follow-up to a weird story. “Plano ISD Sued Over Arrests of High School Booster Club Mothers.”
Mothers from a Jasper High School choir booster club filed a lawsuit claiming Plano Independent School District (ISD) participated in civil conspiracy and had them falsely arrested.
The lawsuit, which names Laura Cervantes and the Jasper High School Choir Booster Club as the plaintiffs, describes the series of events that led to the filing.
Cervantes was elected as president of the booster club in 2019, and in June 2022 the club was filed as an incorporated nonprofit organization. The club utilized a Prosperity Bank account, and three directors, Cervantes, Krisinda Lingenfelter, and Maria King, assumed oversight.
Cervantes’ lawsuit states, “Neither Plano ISD, nor any of its employees, were members, officers, or employees of the organization” at that time.
The directors reportedly sought funding from Plano ISD for repairs in the theater, but allege that the district then flipped the script, asking the booster club to instead fund improvements. When they responded that repairs were not in the description of the club’s functions, Plano ISD claimed that the booster club was no longer acting in compliance with district guidelines and staged a coup, according to Cervantes.
The district disavowed the club and elected new leadership, despite the club operating as a legally separate entity from the district. The lawsuit claims that during that time, “Defendants continued to divert the Booster Club’s mail, kept it, opened it, and used its contents (namely bank statements).”
The lawsuit also claims that the newly elected booster club directors, along with the school’s fine arts director, subsequently went to Prosperity Bank in order to replace the original club directors as authorized signers on the account.
The lawsuit states, “These Defendants’ conduct likely constituted the crime of forgery under [the Texas Penal Code], because they intentionally presented documents intended to defraud the bank and harm the Booster Club by taking over its funds.”
Eventually, the bank notified the three moms that it would be closing the account, and they proceeded to take the check and deposit that money into another bank account at Vantage Bank in the name of the booster club. The check bounced.
In August 2024, a Plano Police Department detective executed a probable cause affidavit — which Cervantes claims was “based entirely off the knowingly false statements of each Defendant” — and obtained warrants for the arrests of Cervantes, Lingenfelter, and King “for the felony offense of theft over $2,500 but less than $30,000.”
They were booked into the Collin County Jail with their bonds set at $25,000 each.
A Collin County grand jury declined to indict the women “for any crime for want of probable cause, and the prosecution was terminated in Cervantes’s favor.”
Plano ISD released a statement about the legal drama, arguing that school-affiliated organizations, including booster clubs, “must follow established guidelines for financial accountability, annual audits and open communication with district leaders.”
The statement did not address the termination of the prosecution, or the district-led formation of the new booster club, but maintained, “Plano ISD did not file any suit against the former booster club- these proceedings were strictly between the current booster organization and the previously disbanded group.”
The statement by Plano ISD also detailed that they gave the $4,437.39 recovered from the old booster club’s account to the new club.
On May 27, the federal lawsuit was filed with Cervantes at the helm. Allegations cover 11 items, from false arrest and unreasonable seizure of property to violations of the rights to free association, free speech, petition.
The lawsuit alleges, “Plano Independent School District and its employees conspir[ed] with private citizens to assume control over a private non-profit organization, take control of its property and monies, and eventually, have the directors of that organization falsely arrested and publicly humiliated – all because the officers of a high school choir booster club would not bend the knee to an out-of-control public school district.”
It seems inexplicable that Plano ISD threw three booster club members in jail in order to steal their $4,437.39…
