Remember just a few months ago when leftwing media pundits told us that commie-loving Twitch streamer Hasan Piker was the future face of the Democrat Party? Evidently in a party for which David Hogg was previously the future face of the party, someone who could actually bench press 200 pounds was seen as a distinctly more manly alternative.
Another sign of how Piker’s popularity has become ever more selective: Piker announced that he would be speaking at the University of Texas, and 2,400 people signed up to watch him. Only 300 actually showed up.
After days of controversy over his appearance at the University of Texas, left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker took the stage Wednesday night to loud cheers from hundreds of students.
The “controversy” wasn’t so great that I even heard of the event until after it had happened.
“Wow, this is quite the eventful speech,” Piker said, appearing to reference the dispute over his appearance after the University Democrats claimed university officials discouraged the event and the group struggled to secure a larger venue after more than 2,400 RSVPs or waitlist signups.
About 300 people attended the event at the William C. Powers Jr. Student Activity Center, the venue originally reserved by organizers. The group returned there after it was unable to secure a larger space. The center has a capacity of about 460, and at least two rows of seats remained empty.
Let’s cue the BB King.
Next we’ll hear he’s not speaking in Boston because it’s not a big college town…
A reminder not to get black-pilled, another Supreme Court win for deporting illegal alien felons, San Francisco’s government offers pedos a veritable buffet, Rockefeller money is going to the ChiComs, and another deeply technical video on semiconductor processes you won’t click on.
Yes, I want to believe, but there’s evidence supporting hope. There’s evidence supporting the idea that the polls are so substantially flawed that they do not accurately reflect what’s going to happen. Again, the caveat – this could be delusion. We could be seeing what we want to see. But then, what we’re seeing is there. There is evidence supporting what we want to happen, evidence worth considering.
We’re seeing how polls have been missing big lately. Look at Abdul El-Sayed. He was supposed to win that Michigan primary in a walk. We’re talking five, 10, 15 points, according to the primary polls. And yet he barely squeaked past that squeaky woman he was competing with. We’ve seen lots of other polls that assured us of a Democrat victory. Just ask President Harris about that.
If you’ve been around a while, you know that the polls always favor the Democrats. You almost never see a Democrat surprise us by exceeding his polling against a Republican. You just don’t. So, there’s that. And of course, there’s an interest in driving down Republican enthusiasm by telling people they can’t win.
Then there’s the gut vibe. Don’t completely disregard that. In Texas, you must believe the Texans are going to support a blasphemous, anti-meat, anti-gun, anti-white, woke weirdo with a thing for trans kids. Does that sound like Texas to you? It sure doesn’t sound like Texas to me, and I’m in Texas. I’ve talked to a lot of Texan conservatives. Not one thinks this guy is going to win. Now, they agree it could theoretically happen, but they don’t think it’s going to. Ken Paxton has won three times in statewide races, and he’s done a lot of great conservative things. Are Texans really going to choose a bizarre homunculus to spend six years in Washington, D.C., voting like Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) in their name? It just doesn’t fit. It’s weird. That’s not saying it couldn’t happen – there are lots of communists here along with other weirdos, losers, and mutations who would be thrilled to have this geebo as a Lone Star senator. But it just doesn’t feel like something that’s going to happen.
Moreover, we’ve been told a lot of conservatives are going to sit this out. The bots on X are certainly pushing that coordinated message, as the semi-coherent comments on my Monday column about quitters demonstrate. Yes, there are probably some Republicans who are going to sit out this midterm, but I haven’t met any of them personally. Maybe you have. I just don’t think there are a lot of them, especially in light of how appalling the Democrats are. It doesn’t make sense, at least to people who aren’t idiots who blame everything on Epstein conspiracies and the Jews and blah blah blah, to be mad at Trump and the Republicans for not being conservative enough and showing them what-for by allowing the election of communists. As risky as it is, I’m not going all-in on the assumption that people are that stupid.
Read the whole thing, and encourage all your sane friends to show up at the polls in November.
Dr. Anthony Fauci privately sounded the alarm when he learned the U.S. Army had conducted an experiment a decade ago that aerosolized the lethal Ebola virus, which is not normally transmitted by air, and then shared the results publicly amid an ongoing outbreak in Africa, according to diary entries obtained by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul.
The then-top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease was particularly concerned in 2016 that the Army medical research arm’s experiment seemed to show that exposure to aerosolized Ebola caused more damaging effects in subjects that had been vaccinated. This was almost four years before he championed shutting down the U.S. economy and social life over the COVID-19 virus outbreak.
Fauci wrote he believed such research should be kept secret, preferably classified, so that it didn’t undermine public confidence in vaccination in the African countries suffering an outbreak of the virus.
“What idiots those guys at USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] are,” Fauci wrote in a March 2016 diary entry. “This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place.”
Why yes, “undermining public confidence in vaccination” is a far bigger concern than the fact that the U.S. Army under Obama was committing an actual war crime.
It’s Tuesday morning at Little Learners Daycare in downtown San Francisco. Teacher Wendy herds bright-eyed toddlers, amped up after playtime in the courtyard, back inside. They’re laughing and swatting at each other playfully, oblivious to the pack of pedophiles lurking nearby.
Four hundred feet away, dozens of registered sex offenders live at 111 Taylor Street. Wendy knew that the Tenderloin, where she operates her Mandarin-immersion daycare, was dangerous. It’s a hotbed for illegal drug activity and homelessness. But she didn’t realize that sex offenders live so close to her daycare—or that taxpayers fund their housing.
Pedophiles, illegal aliens; the only people Democrats don’t like paying for housing for is law-abiding American citizens.
According to this City Journal investigation, more than 25 percent of sex offenders in San Francisco with addresses in the Megan’s Law database live in taxpayer-subsidized buildings. Many live near a park, school, or daycare, or reside in a neighborhood with a high concentration of children. They do all of this despite statewide efforts to ban concentrating pedophiles so close to children. Instead of listening to California voters, San Francisco has become a taxpayer-funded dumping ground for sex criminals.
The Taylor Street Center is one of San Francisco’s most heavily populated sex-offender residences. Located in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street houses at least 31 registered sex offenders. The taxpayer-funded California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the federal Bureau of Prisons contract the private GEO Group to run the facility.
The reentry complex can house 240 people. It hosts specialized programs for residents like “cultural diversity education,” “gender-responsive groups,” and a “weekly meditation group.” The facility sits just 400 feet from a daycare center, 1,000 feet from a fourth-to-eighth-grade school, and five blocks away from a preschool.
Any sex offender housed in the Tenderloin is bound to encounter children. Along with having a high concentration of immigrant and low-income households, the neighborhood also has the highest concentration of kids in the entire city.
I’m sure the sex offenders call that “the buffet.”
President Trump invoked a rare and legally contested power Friday to cancel $810 million in congressionally approved spending, targeting programs for illegal immigrants and a slate of federal initiatives explicitly organized around race and DEI.
The request hits 11 funding pools at seven departments and agencies. It also landed with just five days left in the fiscal year. That’s the point of the disputed “pocket rescission” maneuver: the money runs out before Congress gets its normal 45 days to consider the cuts.
The biggest piece is $567 million at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for services to refugees, asylees, unaccompanied minors, and other non-citizens.
The White House called them “pro-illegal immigration programs” and said the money is no longer needed because illegal border crossings have fallen sharply.
But immigration spending was only part of the package.
Several of the rescissions hit programs explicitly organized around race or ethnicity.
The administration wants to rescind $10 million from the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, which helps minority-owned businesses. The White House pointed to a 2024 federal court ruling that found the agency’s presumption of social disadvantage based on race or ethnicity unconstitutional.
Another $5 million would come from HHS’s Office of Minority Health.
The White House highlighted grants from that office addressing racial trauma among black youth, health disparities among black and Latino youth, a George Washington University fellowship promoting health equity and DEI, and a $1.5 million project addressing the effects of redlining and structural racism.
HUD housing counseling takes a much larger hit, with $56 million targeted.
The administration said the program had funded groups including UnidosUS, the National Urban League, and Housing Action Illinois, criticizing their work on structural racism, racial justice, and other DEI priorities.
Then there is the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, slated to lose $15 million.
The office’s mission included “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions” and restoring racial stability. The Trump administration shut it down earlier this year and now accuses the office of promoting critical race theory and gender ideology rather than carrying out that mission.
The package goes beyond those programs.
The administration identified $28 million in HHS research funding it wants canceled, pointing to grants involving transgender health care, racial disparities, and a $50,000 project to develop a research agenda addressing racism in emergency medicine. Another $70 million would be pulled from international education programs, including programs the White House said had funded research involving queer and transgender issues abroad.
Other cuts include $25 million for migrant student programs, $25 million across two DHS programs providing services or legal assistance to non-citizens, and $9 million for a Treasury program providing debt relief to foreign countries in exchange for conservation commitments.
Now we need to hand out pink slips to the people who were administering these programs.
Long overdue: “Education Dept. Officially Removes Biden’s Title IX Gender Identity Rules. In other words, the department is sticking to the literal interpretation of Title IX: sex-based discrimination.”
The Education Department has officially rescinded the Biden Administration’s Title IX interpretation that extended protections to students based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In other words, the department is sticking to Title IX’s literal meaning: sex-based discrimination.
“Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.”
Honestly, nothing changes because the department has been enforcing reality since January 2025: Title IX is based on sex. It’s not based on your sexual orientation or gender identity.
Somehow, the people who tell us that they were “born this way” and that “sexuality is a spectrum” are now returning to normal. It’s almost like the whole “acceptance” movement was just a social contagion that spread because teens like being rebellious!
The Supreme Court majority (6-3) has granted the DOJ request to put on hold a Boston-based US District Judge ruling that DHS policy to remove illegal aliens to so-called third countries is unlawful. The process of rapid deportation will continue while the matter is called before the Supreme Court for oral arguments in December (ruling in ’27).
The Usual Suspects opposed deporting the Democrat Party’s precious illegal alien felons.
Former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed at least 4,782 political donations to President Donald Trump from Americans across the country between September 2019 and August 2023, Senator Chuck Grassley revealed during a Tuesday hearing featuring the former special counsel.
The checks — which Smith’s team acquired as part of their election case against Trump, dubbed “Arctic Frost” — contained donors’ personal information, including their home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures. Some of the subpoenaed donations were for as little as $1. Grassley revealed the evidence while questioning Smith during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing and followed up with a press release containing further details.
During former President Joe Biden’s administration, Smith brought two cases against Trump: The first accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and the second involved him keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Smith resigned from his position nine days before Trump was sworn in as president again; both cases against Trump have been dismissed.
As part of the FBI’s investigation into the 2020 election, agents accessed toll records, which show who a given individual spoke with on the phone but not the contents of their calls, for 16 members of Congress. He also subpoenaed records from 87 Trump White House phones, which captured records from calls between government sources and dozen of news outlets.
The political donations Grassley described were obtained as part of Smith’s investigation, which focused on whether Trump defrauded donors by raising money under the false pretext that the resulting donations would help Trump’s team overturn the results of the 2020 election.
All the easier to compile an enemies list should Democrats retake power…
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a $1.4 billion U.S.-based charity with funding from the Rockefeller family and other donors, has forged a “dangerous partnership with Communist China” and is pouring millions of dollars into China-based nonprofits that are advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy goals.
That’s one of the findings in a new report, “The Rockefeller Network: How the Rockefeller Family Turned Their Oil Fortune into Extreme Climate Activism,” out today from Americans for Public Trust, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative watchdog organization. The report, an advance copy of which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, outlines how the billion-dollar fortune of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., who died in 1937, is being used “to quietly bankroll numerous radical and leftist projects.”
Snip.
“An alarming amount—well into the millions—has found its way directly into the coffers of entities that are either official vestiges of the Chinese government, or directly and irrefutably administered by the CCP and its representatives,” the report says. “And many of these entities, while operating under the guise of ‘green’ and environmental research, are, instead, using these funds to help buttress China’s foreign influence programs around the globe, especially the CCP’s infamous ‘Belt and Road Initiative.'”
Among the grants singled out in the report as most problematic:
— $400,000 between 2020 and 2024 to the Foreign Environment Cooperation Center, “a division of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.”
— Nearly $1.5 million to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, whose “direct ties to the Chinese government are undeniable.”
— Nearly $200,000 to Tsinghua University, which announced in 2024 that the school’s office of the president had merged with the Chinese Communist Party to “form a new Party Committee Office that would run the school.”
Groups that fund the ChiComs should have their non-profit status revoked and their assets seized.
Democrats are always saying the quiet part out loud nowadays.
They aren’t even trying to hide their radical plans to totally replace America’s voters, workers, and people with a cheap labor underclass that disproportionately votes Democrat.
[ U.S. Representative] Democrat Tom Suozzi says his biggest goal in politics is mass amnesty for criminal illegals:
“My biggest goal of what I want to accomplish in politics right now is I want to legalize 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 million people in our country.”
Amnesty was always the end goal for the illegal alien importation.
Obvious: “UK Whistleblower: 99 percent of Asylum Claims Are Fake.”
Only one in 100 asylum claims are genuine, according to a whistleblower who has revealed widespread fraud and dysfunction in the system.
The Home Office official, who has worked for years as a decision-maker on asylum and has assessed thousands of claims, said asylum seekers from certain countries use the “same script” in what he and colleagues describe as “package claims”.
He said he had encountered a large number of Iraqi Kurds claiming asylum who said they had been in a relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan region. The official said it had become a “running joke” among colleagues that the number of Iraqi Kurds who said they were involved with the daughter was in the “hundreds”.
He also said that “hundreds” of claims from Pakistanis were based on the assertion that they were in fear of their lives in their home country because of their gay relationship with the same man who had provided letters supporting their claims.
The source also disclosed suspicions about large numbers of Bangladeshi claimants purporting to be dissidents of the former governing party, which is now banned, even though they were unable to provide basic information about the group.
An 18-year-old woman has been gang raped and beaten by up to ten different men, many of them with a Syrian background, in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Although the rape occurred in May 2025, the suspects are only now being arrested. In response to the rape, political leader Geert Wilders wrote that the Netherlands also has Islamic grooming gangs and called for all the perpetrators to be removed from the country along with their families.
Six suspects have now been arrested, aged 20 to 23. During the incident, the girl, who lived in a residential group home, was driven to two different parking lots and raped by several men, some of whom filmed the assault and shared it on Snapchat. Police say the woman was humiliated and beaten.
And somehow the leaders of UK’s Labour Party say “Yes, we need more of that.”
A plane leaving Dubai and heading towards Tel Aviv almost saw a tragic end as the co-pilot of the plane turned hijacker mid-flight and attempted to take control and crash the plane….
The co-pilot, an Omani national, stabbed the pilot multiple times in an attempt to kill him and hijack the flight. The co-pilot had worked for FlyDubai for around a year.
The injured pilot was able to transmit a radio warning, Israel scrambled fighter jets, and the passengers and crew were able to subdue the attacker in midair.
The plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia to sort the entire mess out.
Be prepared to fight for your life on a moment’s notice, because you might have to.
More long overdue. “Trump expands H-1B visa crackdown, will scrutinize layoffs.”
The Trump administration on Thursday announced an executive order expanding the ongoing crackdown against H-1B visa abuse.
The H-1B is a visa program designed to allow companies to bring in high-skilled workers when no qualified Americans are available. But the program has faced considerable scrutiny in recent years, due to widespread fraud. Critics have argued that major employers also use it as a way to undercut American wages.
Trump’s Thursday order reaffirms the $100,000 application fee he imposed last year, but now mandates inter-agency coordination to consider an employers’s recent or planned layoffs when applying for H-1B visas.
“Our message to corporate America is simple: We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor,” Vice President JD Vance said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 121 individuals during a summer enforcement initiative around Lake Lewisville in Dallas.
The operation, led by ICE’s Dallas field office, began June 27 and concluded over Labor Day weekend. It involved coordination with state and federal agencies, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and focused on identifying individuals unlawfully present in the country, assisting with lake-related investigations, and allowing local officers to devote more resources to boating safety enforcement.
According to ICE’s Friday release, individuals arrested during the initiative had criminal histories involving offenses such as assault, family violence, theft, burglary, sexual assault of a child, driving while intoxicated, and boating while intoxicated.
Among those arrested were two men ICE identified as members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization designated by the U.S. State Department as both a foreign terrorist organization and a specially designated global terrorist group.
Willian Josue Ordonez Vasquez, 24, a Venezuelan national, and Edwin Josue Cabrera-Zelaya, 22, a Honduran national, were under investigation by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for allegedly operating an illegal livery business on Lake Lewisville.
I must say that I’ve never run into “illegal livery business” before, but it seems to involve not complying with Texas regulations on powered boat rental.
Man bites dog: “Too extreme for Newsom? California sanctuary bill for abortion, transgender procedures vetoed.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom used his veto pen to make out-of-state prosecutions theoretically possible for both “reproductive health care services” and “gender affirming health care services.”
The term-limited Democrat with presidential ambitions, who recently said he won’t run if fellow Californian and former Democratic nominee Kamala Harris enters the 2028 presidential race, vetoed legislation (AB 2164) to codify an extradition ban for “legally protected health care activity” in California, claiming it infringed executive authority.
Ignore the blather about Harris, Governor Hairgel is obviously running.
Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist.
Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms.
And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble.
They took 194 undergraduates and split them up.
One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience.
The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor.
The AI didn’t just win. It embarrassed the institution.
Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom.
They scored 30% higher on the final assessment.
And they did it in less time.
Let that sink in.
A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth.
Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience.
This study just proved both of those moats are gone.
When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently.
Yeah, but can AI forge friendships with the spawn of rich people, the primary purpose of so many attending the Ivy League? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A Detroit pastor who last year admonished a parishioner for her inadequate church donation of $1,235 was paid a salary of $538,955 that year by a taxpayer-funded nonprofit he leads that is separate from the church, according to federal records.
That salary for Marvin Winans Sr. — the pastor of Perfecting Church and a Grammy-winning gospel singer — accounted for about 61% of what the nonprofit spent toward its stated mission of “community development,” its recent report to the Internal Revenue Service shows.
His role as president for the nonprofit — Perfecting Community Development Corporation — is a half-time job, the report says, which means he was paid about $518 per hour.
Nice work if you can get it.
Winans’ salary has increased substantially in recent years and coincided with a $500,000 government grant the state awarded the nonprofit. Grant application guidance indicates the award was funded with federal pandemic relief money.
Of course it was.
Seems like Pastor Winans was far more concerned with fat stacks than flocks…
Another terror plot thwarted. “Suspect Arrested for Alleged Thwarted Capitol Attack Now in Federal Custody. Benny Caldera, Jr. was released from the Bexar County Jail into federal custody.”
A man was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Texas State Capitol in Austin early in the morning of Wednesday, September 30.
The attack was allegedly set to occur on October 1.
Forty-year-old Benny Caldera, Jr., of Converse, was arrested by a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) SWAT team, according to reporting by NBC DFW.
He was booked into the Bexar County Jail and charged with making a terroristic threat against a public servant, a third degree felony, and was held on a $75,000 bond. It was not immediately clear if Caldera has a lawyer or how he plans to plead in response to the charge.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit, DPS was told by a friend of Caldera’s that he “had made verbal threats to assault the Texas State Capitol Building.” He is alleged to have said “I am going to the Capitol and I am going to shoot it up.”
Arrest documents also allege that Caldera’s motive was anger at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel political lobbying group, of which he reportedly said “these people have to be exterminated.”
Of course. Always The Joooooos!
Possibly just a dumbass shooting off his mouth. But lots of similar dumbasses have racked up kill counts in recent decades.
Make New Mexico Texas again? “Texas House Weighs Annexation of New Mexican Counties. The unlikely proposal could benefit the Permian Basin, one state representative claimed.” The chances of New Mexico agreeing without receiving something ridiculous in return (like El Paso) are virtually zero.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced the company’s decision, saying it is a $684 million capital investment that could create 3,800 jobs. The governor also announced that a Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) grant totaling $43,849,500, paired with a Veteran Created Job Bonus of $40,000, was offered to the company.
ASML wants larger EUV masks to support their High Numerical Aperture EUV stepper. “TSMC and ASML recently announced that the Taiwanese fab will adopt High-NA EUV for high volume manufacturer in 2030. In order to make this economical, the two giants will push the industry to adopt larger 6 in x 12in rectangular photo masks.” This is going to be a challenge for the entire industry ecosystem.
Retro-future noir. With aliens. Directed by Brad Bird. Mood: Cautious optimism.
BeardMeatsFood demolishes a 7 Deadly Sins challenge…and then promptly orders two more burgers and dessert. (OK, technically four more burgers, but it looks like he gave two to the cameraman.)
I just sent out my latest Lame Excuse Books catalog of SF/F/H books. Drop me a line if you’d like to receive a copy.
“Feminist Mad That The Men She Hates Won’t Date Her.” “I don’t get it. I’m aggressive, shrill, angry, and I talk online all the time about how much I hate men. Why won’t any of them ask me out?”
I would buy this so hard: “Mattel Confirms Hanukkah Barbie Comes Complete With Space Laser.”
A happy reunion:
A dog was lost for two days.
They found her and when they took her back to her owner, she started crying. https://t.co/J17xaSYMRe
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton hasn’t been shy about taking on big entities breaking Texas law, be it Meta, ActBlue or MyChart. Now Paxton has taken aim at an association intertwined with the heart of America’s legal system, the American Bar Association.
Texas is investigating the American Bar Association’s alleged anti-competitive law school accreditation practices.
According to Attorney General Ken Paxton, the investigation will examine whether accreditation requirements set by the American Bar Association (ABA) “have unlawfully restricted competition or increased the cost of legal education, including through requirements affecting faculty compensation and law school operations.”
Paxton alleged that the American Bar Association has “weaponized” its “significant influence over legal education” across the nation to “artificially inflate faculty salaries, exclude law schools who challenged the ABA’s view of ‘elite’ legal education, and impose costly, burdensome accreditation requirements.”
Additionally, he alleged that the ABA uses its accreditation power to “impose unconstitutional racial and gender preference requirements on law schools’ admissions and hiring processes.”
Paxton also argued in his Wednesday announcement that this anticompetitiveness has levied significant costs on both existing and potential law schools, which deprives “the market of innovative, lower-cost approaches to legal education.”
“There must be competition and a fair playing field when it comes to law school accreditation, or else we risk inflated costs for students, unfair restrictions, and illegal discriminatory practices,” said Paxton. “My office will investigate whether the law school accreditation process has been used to unlawfully limit competition and burden students and institutions. No organization should be permitted to use its position of influence to violate our antitrust laws.”
Earlier this year, the Texas Supreme Court issued an opinion that eliminates the requirement for law students to attend an ABA accredited law school before taking the state bar exam, which Paxton noted will open new avenues for students to attain a legal education.
The court’s opinion highlighted that it intends to continue giving “approval to schools that satisfy a set of simple, objective, and ideologically neutral criteria using metrics no more onerous than those currently required by the ABA.”
For the majority of America’s history, lawyers didn’t need either American Bar Association imprimatur (or even a law degree) to practice law. Abraham Lincoln and Clarence Darrow never went to law school. Parallel to the New Deal, the ABA and the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) sought to cartelize the legal profession to restrict access and raise rates. Previously, self-study and apprenticeship was the path to a legal career.
Forcing law schools to implement quotas and cram social justice down student’s throats is a good reason to strip the ABA of its law school gatekeeper powers.
Labour’s Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has just set the stage for yet another betrayal of the British people. That’s the only conclusion one can draw after listening to Shabana Mahmood’s speech at the Labour Party conference.
Because what Labour has put into motion is an entirely new wave of immigration that will further undermine our already weak economy, erode trust in our democracy, put British people at risk, and utterly transform what’s left of an already broken nation.
Before getting into the detail of Labour’s disastrous policy, a reminder.
The Labour Party has still not fixed Britain’s broken borders. It has not stopped the boats. It has not removed an estimated 1.5 million illegal migrants in Britain. It has not returned levels of legal immigration back to the sensible levels that were seen before Tony Blair and Labour fired the starting gun on mass immigration, in 1997.
And because of all this Labour has still not restored public trust and confidence in a system that is now so broken it is pushing rising numbers of British people into leaving the ballot box to join protests, demonstrations, and civil disobedience.
Yet despite failing to do all this, astonishingly, this week Andy Burnham’s Labour Party and Shabana Mahmood decided to put the narrow interests of their fanatical left-wing activists and Labour’s Muslim voters ahead of the interests of the country by announcing an entirely new wave of refugee migration from the Third World and a dramatic softening of current immigration policy.
Contrary to what every single opinion poll in Britain now shows, that a large majority of British people want immigration reduced, Shabana Mahmood’s extreme policy will now re-open and turbo-charge the UK Resettlement Scheme, importing as yet unknown numbers of refugees into Britain from Afghanistan, Gaza, and many other Third World nations. It will open immediately, with one-quarter of the first arrivals coming from Afghanistan and Palestine.
Britain, remember, has already taken in nearly 400,000 refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong. Some 50,000 Afghans and refugees through resettlement programmes. Another 210,000 illegal migrants on the small boats. And, thanks to the Boriswave, has already added nearly 3 million mainly low-wage, low-skill migrants from outside Europe to its population – net – through legal schemes since 2021 alone.
But if the Boriswave has become known for imposing a policy of mass migration from outside Europe that nobody voted for, then Shabana Mahmood’s new policy — what we might call the Shabbywave — is about to put all this on steroids.
It will be characterised by a fresh wave of mainly low-skill, low-wage, poorly-educated and Islamic migrants and refugees from radically different cultures who will not only be allowed into Britain but put on a path towards permanent settlement.
That’s right. Despite Britain already giving permanent settlement to roughly 700,000 people since 2021 alone, and about to give it to millions more Boriswave migrants who arrived between 2021 and 2024, Labour will fast-track another wave of migrants from the Third World into receiving Indefinite Leave to Remain.
They will be allowed to stay in Britain permanently and have unfettered access to welfare benefits, housing, education, and more, all of which will be subsidised and paid for by … the British people.
Despite already having to pay roughly £600 billion to cover the costs of the Boriswave, with most of those arrivals being a net fiscal cost to the British state, the hardworking and long-suffering British people will now have to pay who knows how much for yet another wave of migration they never asked for.
My critics will say “the people who come will work, they will contribute”. Well, look at the evidence. When Denmark imported hundreds of Palestinians during the 1990s, the majority soon had at least one criminal conviction and most lived on welfare.
When Denmark then tracked what happened to their children, more than one-third also had at least one criminal conviction, with many more relying on welfare. And, meanwhile, what evidence we have suggests people from Afghanistan are far more likely than everybody else to commit sexual violence against British women.
Snip.
All we do know is that Labour openly state the scheme will operate at “much higher capacity” than anything the British state currently has in place. And while Shabana Mahmood is doing all this, she also clearly signalled this week that she will water down other immigration restrictions.
Foreign workers will now find it easier, not harder, to claim permanent residence in Britain. The Boriswave will be made permanent and all those millions of people who were brought into the country with no democratic mandate, and who are taking more out of the economy than they are putting in, will now remain here forever.
Proposed reforms to the disastrous Boriswave are clearly about to be scrapped by a Labour Party that has abandoned any pretence to represent the British people and has moved sharply to the radical left to appease its own base.
We are now living under a Labour government that is more interested in winning over Mad Zack Polanski’s Green party voters than representing the wider country. We are living under a Labour government that is focused on consolidating increasingly radical left-wing voters ahead of an early general election than consolidating support around some kind of national majority that reflects the mood of the British people.
Make no mistake: this student union politics could easily push our country, already a tinderbox, completely over the edge.
A governing Labour Party that has no interest at all in appealing beyond its narrow coalition of radical left-wing progressives and voters from minority backgrounds.
Entirely new migration routes into Britain. A new wave of migration nobody asked for. A sponsorship scheme that has disaster written all over it.
The United Nations inserting itself into our national democracy. Permanent settlement and British citizenship being handed out like confetti, along with the ridiculous claim that people from Afghanistan and Gaza will be just as ‘British’ or ‘English’ as the rest of us.
Endless, never-ending chain migration into Britain turning the initial numbers into enormous ones. The removal of what little restrictions to immigration were at least being discussed. And underneath it all, the British people being smashed all over again with more costs, more pressures, more misery, more turbulence.
This is the Shabbywave. A new policy that nobody in this country voted for or asked for but will further undermine, destabilise, and transform the country from within.
So the solution to the radical unpopularity among actual voters of Labour’s policies to import unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens is to…import more unassimilated Muslim until the desired transformation of the electorate to one more favorable to Labour is complete.
Bonus: Here’s a video that just dropped with hotel owner John Mappin talking about how shadowy Labour government functionaries threatened to use his luxury hotel to house illegal aliens.
Some of the most interesting take-aways: They would have security for the hotel, but not to keep the illegal aliens from leaving or committing crimes, but to keep ordinary citizens out, and how property values crash when illegal aliens take up residence in local hotels.
Microsoft is in the news again, and if you’re familiar at all with that company, you know that means bad news. (What’s the last time Microsoft news being good news? Ballmer stepping down? The release of Windows 3.1?)
In an exclusive Meet the Press interview set to air this weekend, the Microsoft co-founder told Kristen Welker that artificial intelligence is “certainly powerful enough to drive events that… cause a billion deaths” – then used the line to demand federal legislation, law-enforcement monitoring, and an end to industry self-regulation.
Gates is touting AI as a species-level emergency, and calling for handing over total control to politicians and a new class of global inspectors.
Welker put the extinction question to him directly: “Do you believe AI is powerful enough to end all of humanity?”
Gates answered: “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths, you know, so even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100%, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”
Of course. This is part of the AI psy-op in which some AI megacorps argue that AI is so dangerous that you have to go regulate those other megacorps, and we have just the regulators to do it.
Microsoft accidentally wiped some nonprofit customers’ M365 data before their retention period expired – and now says it cannot tell them what disappeared, or even whether they lost anything.
The cockup followed Microsoft’s retirement of its Microsoft 365 Business Premium grant, which gave eligible nonprofits ten free licenses for the productivity suite.
Microsoft announced in May 2025 that the grant would not renew after July 1 that year. It offered eligible nonprofits up to 300 free Microsoft 365 Business Basic licenses, alongside discounted pricing for plans including Business Premium.
The company urged customers to move users onto another nonprofit plan before cancellation to avoid disruption or data loss. Organizations could also export anything they did not intend to retain in Microsoft 365.
The problem arose after the subscriptions were deactivated. In an email to one affected customer seen by The Register, Microsoft admitted that, “due to an error,” it had deleted remaining data before the retention and export window closed. Attempts to recover it had failed.
“We have now investigated the recovery options, but unfortunately, the data cannot be recovered,” Microsoft said.
Redmond cannot determine what disappeared either. The company said it was “currently unable to provide a list showing which data may have been deleted or whether any data was deleted at all.” It could say only that the problem involved expired Business Premium subscriptions.
“Keep from deleting customer data” should be a task tens of orders of magnitude easier than “preventing Skynet.” Yet Microsoft can’t even handle that.
You should backup your data. You should have multiple backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data saved to different types of backup media. Ideally, you should have multiple rolling or rotating backups of your data saved to different types of backup media including off-site backups.
To make the salient points yet again: 1. When you store your data in “the Cloud,” you’re simply storing your data on someone else’s computer. 2. Cloud storage should never be your only data backup solution.
Never rely on a single point of failure for your data. Especially when that single point is Microsoft.
The International Institute of St. Louis has a prescription for Missouri communities losing residents: bring in more immigrants.
Its 2025–2027 strategic plan describes increased immigrant resettlement as an opportunity to:
“reverse decades of population decline”
The same blueprint calls for funding changes that would:
“insulate the agency from political and economic circumstances”
Grow the immigrant population. Build the financial means to keep the organization operating through political shifts. Those objectives appear in the same document, which names St. Louis and Springfield as communities central to its work.
The organization pursuing this vision reported $33.3 million in government grants in 2024—roughly 80 percent of its total support and revenue, according to its annual report.
So St. Louis taxpayers are footing the bill to have themselves replaced.
Taxpayers have helped sustain an institution that treats immigration as an answer to the region’s demographic future. Its programs show how that ambition becomes a practical offer to prospective residents.
The institute’s Afghan Support Program encourages families already elsewhere in America to relocate to St. Louis. Its advertised housing assistance:
“Covers up to three months of rent and one security deposit”
The offer includes a rental limit. The page also describes monthly gift cards for each family member until food stamps are approved, bus passes for classes, and help applying for SNAP, Medicaid, and WIC.
Housing support helps families establish themselves. Application assistance connects them with public benefits. Employment services and English classes help them settle into the local workforce.
For residents skeptical of further immigration, this is a concrete policy concern: a nonprofit is assembling the services that make relocation possible, with public-benefit enrollment included in the package.
A July 2026 program account documents one completed move. Nematullah Hussaini, operator of Rasa Cleaning Solution, relocated from Texas through the Afghan Support Program and received a $20,000 business grant.
The account names Jerry Schlichter as a funder of the Afghan Support Program. Representatives from the mayor’s Office of New Americans attended the grant celebration alongside institute leadership and people who had moved from other communities.
Did anyone poll the people of St. Louis to see if they wanted their tax dollars going to lure Afghans to their city?
The program’s thirteenth grant round, with a September 20, 2026 deadline, limited eligibility to Afghans who arrived in the United States after August 2021 and had not previously received one of its grants. Business documentation and proof of arrival were required.
That eligibility restriction deserves scrutiny from local entrepreneurs who cannot apply for the same opportunity.
If this is taxpayer-supported, how can it survive Equal Protection Clause scrutiny if it discriminates on the basis of national origin?
The institute occupies an influential position in Missouri’s refugee system. Since becoming the state’s replacement designee in 2018, it has operated the Missouri Office of Refugee Administration, which distributes federal funds to service providers and monitors their programs.
HHS records list $15,082,407 in award actions during fiscal 2025 under the institute’s name, with further cash-and-medical-assistance funding recorded in 2026.
This one tiny NGO in one state is spending $15 million to import Muslims as an explicit replacement for the locals. I assume they hope Afghans improve Democrat chances in the state the same way Somalis have done in Minnesota.
These awards cover refugee programs, including statewide administration. The records do not establish that government grants paid for Move2STL or the Afghan relocation package.
The institution’s dependence on government money, however, is clear.
Democrats haven’t won Missouri at the presidential level since Clinton won in 1996 (and even then, he needed help from Ross Perot), though Obama lost the state by less than 4,000 votes in 2008.
Obviously, the increasing Republican trend of Missouri is intolerable to the social justice Democrats, and their fix is not to moderate their positions, but to import more Muslims into the area.
And they want taxpaying citizens to foot the bill.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? You can’t make your particular religion the official legal religion of the land anywhere in the United States, and you can’t keep people from exercising their own religion. Somehow, those Muslims that Democrats have imported into the United States don’t seem to have gotten the message.
A flock of chickens have come home to roost for Dearborn, Michigan, and its mayor, Abdullah Hammoud. He and his administration are being sued for violating the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and the evidence supporting the claim is overwhelming. More on this lawsuit can be found here: “Journalist Sues Dearborn and Its Mayor for Anti-Christian, Anti-Jewish Discrimination,” by Dexter Van Zile, Middle East Forum, September 18, 2026:
…A year and a few days after Hammoud berated a local pastor who complained about the mayor’s praise for a Hezbollah supporter, Margot Cleveland, a journalist and legal commentator who writes for The Federalist, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Hammoud and the city he governs. The suit, filed by the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) on September 17, 2026, accuses the city and its leaders of violating the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits government institutions from showing preference for one religion over another.
“For too long, the City of Dearborn has been a hostile place for Christians and Jews. Defendant Hammoud has taken this hostility to the next level, openly conveying the message that Christians and Jews are not welcome in the city and are, indeed, second-class citizens,” the complaint declares, echoing arguments previously made in the pages of Focus on Western Islamism.
The complaint details a pattern of alleged religious favoritism dating back to April 2025, when Cleveland discovered the city had spent public funds—roughly $1,500 on “Ramadan Kareem” banners and $5,000 on a lit crescent-moon display in a municipal park—while providing no equivalent recognition for Lent or the approaching Passover holiday. According to the suit, Cleveland’s subsequent request that the city treat Christian and Jewish holidays with the same public recognition went unanswered, even as the city’s police department sold Ramadan-themed shirts bearing its official emblem and Hammoud used his government email to promote an Iftar event. The lawsuit alleges the disparity only widened in 2026, when the city installed additional lighted Ramadan displays that Hammoud himself described as reflecting “who we are as a city,” while the City Council’s budget that same year again included no funding for comparable Christian or Jewish observances despite a budget surplus and Cleveland’s repeated public appeals.
“Neither [city attorney] Mr. Romer nor anyone else from the City responded to Plaintiff’s email,” the complaint reports.
The suit brings three claims: a First Amendment retaliation claim alleging that the city and Hammoud punished Cleveland for her journalism and advocacy by freezing her out of communications and public meetings; a Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection claim alleging she was treated worse than similarly situated residents because of her religious and political viewpoints; and an Establishment Clause claim alleging the city unconstitutionally preferred Islam over Christianity and Judaism through its sponsorship of religious displays and events. The complaint points to Hammoud’s own public statement that the Ramadan program reflects “who we are as a city” as evidence of an official government endorsement of one faith over others, and asks the court for a declaratory judgment, an injunction against the city’s allegedly discriminatory practices, nominal damages, and attorneys’ fees…
Naturalized citizens swear an oath to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” If naturalized Muslims openly support suborning the Constitution to Sharia law, they are in violation of their oath and should be de-naturalized.
A lawsuit against Hammoud and his Sharia-loving cronies is a good start, but the Department of Justice should also come down on him like a ton of bricks for deprivation of rights under color of law.
Throughout this year, Ukraine has successfully launched several small counterattacks that retook small amounts of Ukrainian territory from the Russian invaders, usually on the order of thirty or forty kilometers. Their latest counterattack, Operation Vivaldi, seems a bigger affair, liberating more land and featuring some interesting tactical and technological wrinkles.
For twenty months, Russia’s 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies ground toward Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine that sits on a critical road and railway juncture. By seizing it, Russia would gain a crucial logistics hub to sustain its campaign to encircle the Fortress Belt, the cities anchoring Ukraine’s defense in Donetsk. But in May, Ukraine’s 3rd Corps launched Operation Vivaldi. In just a few weeks, Ukraine collapsed the Russian salient, encircled elements of the 2nd and 14th Motorized Rifle Divisions, and liberated up to 250 square kilometers of land.
The Ukrainian corps performed this masterpiece by achieving drone dominance over Russian forces. Provided with two brigades from Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, 3rd Corps saturated Russian rear areas with drones. One Russian military blogger reported how a considerable number of Ukrainian Hornet drones, which operate more than 150 kilometers behind Russian lines, attacked river crossings, disrupted logistics, and prevented reinforcements. These strikes isolated the Russian forces and, as their logistics system collapsed, prevented them from receiving the personnel, parts, and energy needed to effectively operate their own drones.
Remarkably, 3rd Corps reported that its forces neutralized Rubicon, Russia’s elite drone unit, “destroying its logistics, ammunition depots, drone launch sites and newly formed units and killing their experienced drone operators.” To prevent its complete loss, Russia withdrew Rubicon from the Lyman axis. Blinded, Russia was vulnerable to the Ukrainian counterattack.
Ukraine’s Third Army Corps carried out what it described as the first-ever attack involving unmanned ground vehicles deployed by heavy bomber drones during Operation Vivaldi, the corps reported on September 24.
According to the corps, heavy bomber drones operated by the Third Assault Brigade deployed NC13 strike unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), known as “Gryphons,” more than 10 kilometers behind Russian lines.
The Third Army Corps said cameras mounted on the ground robots recorded the operation, which resulted in Russian soldiers being killed and wounded in an area where they had not expected such an attack.
The tactic was developed from scratch by soldiers of the NC13 strike UGV unit and implemented with support from the brigade’s unmanned aerial systems.
Here’s Preston Stewart on how details of the operation unfolded:
“It is a very dirty, grimy task that is playing out right now in Vivaldi, really with any clearance operations in this war now for some time.”
“It’s not a matter of there’s one base and you’ve got to clear that one base of enemy personnel, they are scattered all over the place, and in some of these areas you’ll find that the Russian soldiers have been there not for a day or two, but for weeks or even months.”
“They’re able to make pretty well concealed positions hide in the basement, in the cellars.”
“In the Dobropillya direction, we hear Ukrainian soldiers talking about tunnels between basements from one house to the next. The Russians had the time. They didn’t want to come out at daylight, because they’d be shown to Ukrainian drones hunted down and killed.”
“The most interesting aspect of all this, I would argue, is the use of these unmanned ground vehicles being dropped behind Russian lines to carry out assault operations.”
“The Third Assault said or third army corps said during these operations UAVs and robotic systems were always deployed ahead of the infantry. The Third Arm Corps was the first in the world to begin deploying ground robotic complexes. ‘Our heavy bombers deliver robotic kamikaze systems over 10 kilometers deep in enemy territory.'”
A great deal of effort was put into degrading Russia’s own Rubicon drone unit. Ukraine: “Third Corps fighters disabled Rubicon’s command system. They destroyed its logistics, ammunition depots, drone launch sites, newly formed units, and experienced UAV operators. The Russians lost the ability to quickly replenish the unit with resources and trained personnel.”
“[Ukrainian General Andriy] Biletsky talked about this as well, kind of shutting down the sky to Russian drones. You can’t conduct offensive operations in even a contested airspace. You got to have pretty close to complete control or it’s not going to do any good. You’re going to have just a constant flow of glide bombs and drones coming to hit your position. It’s not feasible. So, we do know that Ukraine focused heavily on degrading and attritting the Russian drone capabilities in that area.”
Russian sources, of course, continue to lie about the situation. “Just last week we had Russian sources saying that they had been pushed back behind this river [I think the Hruzka], which means the the Russian announcements from the Ministry of Defense is off by nearly 30km.” The thermocline of truth is alive and well in the Russian army.
Paratroop operations have traditionally been high risk, high reward plays. In World War II, Operation Varsity was a success, but Market Garden wasn’t. Adding heliborne units ups both both risk and reward, and U.S. forces in Desert Storm successfully set up advanced refueling stations behind enemy lines to maintain the high tempo attack. The big risk has always been troops being killed or captured behind enemy lines, but drones dropping UGVs eliminates that risk. There’s still the possibility of losing the bomber drone to jamming, but that’s always a concern employing them in any capacity.
We’ve already seen Ukraine deploy machine gun equipped UGVs in defensive positions. I wonder what havoc might be wrought by dropping a few of these on logistics crossroads deep behind Russian lines…
The Supreme Court green-lights verifying American citizenship for voting, fraud, fraud, and more fraud, Trump gets Greenland without having to buy it, Cruz looks at EPIC City terrorism ties, the Clancy holdout juror speaks, some horrifying child abuse cases, and completely different horrifying murder house, and a surprising amount of Norm Macdonald.
The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 said the Trump administration can use an updated immigration database to verify the citizenship of voters.
A majority of justices agreed to stay pending the outcome of an appeal of a June order from a federal judge that barred the use of a revamped database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had found that federal officials were violating the privacy rights of American citizens by disclosing the citizenship status and Social Security numbers, among other data, in the restructured database. She vacated the 2025 update, which connected Social Security information to the system.
A federal appeals court later upheld the decision.
Trump administration officials then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing in a Sept. 8 brief that the order “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by states to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”
Six justices sided with the administration. In a per curiam opinion, they said that claims from the organizations that sued over the updated database “likely lack merit,” including the allegation that federal officials are violating federal laws, because Congress authorized the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive citizenship information and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration, in a 1996 statute called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.
The majority also said that keeping in place the prohibition “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies.”
States regularly use the system. Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden recently said the state in the fall of 2025 ran the names of its 18 million registered voters through the database and identified 2,724 people who may be noncitizens.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
“USDA Targets 170 NYC Retailers in SNAP Fraud Sweep. ‘SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,’ White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said.”
The Trump administration has stopped more than $5.8 billion in SNAP fraud since taking office, and its latest sweep just hit New York City, where hundreds of undercover investigations led to enforcement action against 170 retailers across all five boroughs.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced “Operation SNAP Back” on Friday as part of a broader push against retailer fraud in the nearly $100 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“This is just the latest action in the Trump Administration’s fight against fraud. The message is clear, if you accept any portion of an annual $100 billion taxpayer program, you must follow the rules or face the consequences,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said. “We owe it to every American taxpayer to safeguard their hard-earned dollars, and these latest enforcement actions are just a small part of the Food and Nutrition Administration’s efforts to remove criminals and bad actors from food stamps.”
The cases involve SNAP trafficking, where benefits are exchanged for cash, along with retailers accused of allowing benefits to be used for alcohol and other ineligible non-food items. USDA says penalties can range from temporary suspension to permanent disqualification and monetary fines. Several cases were also referred to the USDA Office of Inspector General for possible criminal investigation and prosecution.
Investigators used undercover purchases at stores suspected of violating SNAP rules. Some retailers were caught exchanging benefits for cash, while others allegedly processed transactions for prohibited products.
“SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,” White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said. “And thanks to Secretary Rollins, such waste and abuse will stop.”
Here’s your reminder that the fraud is still continuing – boldly, even! – after months of nonstop reporting about it.
Katie Daviscourt of the Post Millennial did some looking into Somali-run daycares in the Seattle area, many of which receive tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars monthly, and you’ll never guess what she found.
Most showed no signs of kids.
Many neighbors say they’ve never seen anything that looks like a daycare in the area!
These families get together, watch each other’s kids sometimes, incorporate as a “daycare,” and collect tens of thousands a month.
Here’s the PM:
In total, Daviscourt reported that in just two neighborhoods there were over $5 million in potential abuses of taxpayer funds, and they had gone to over 20 locations reporting to be daycare locations. Under Seattle’s Child Care Assistance Program, daycares can request government funding in order to back their businesses when they are caring for low-to-middle-income families.
Vice President JD Vance and the White House’s anti-fraud task force canceled Affordable Care Act policies covering more than 760,000 people, the administration announced Tuesday, citing suspected improper and fraudulent enrollments.
The task force, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimates the move will save taxpayers $2.2 billion.
Following the cancellation of 315,000 enrollments, the vice president said officials are going to conduct “additional verification” on about 419,000 more enrollees, whom they suspect may be improperly enrolled or ineligible for the program. Similarly, the Trump administration is banning some insurance brokers who are thought to be complicit in the fraudulent enrollment.
“We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled,” Vance said. “We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits.”
Snip.
“This is what the fraud task force is all about,” the vice president said, alongside CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and other senior administration officials at Tuesday’s press conference. “Saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important” are not victim to waste and fraud.
Oz noted that CMS has issued termination notices to hundreds of brokers, including 469 in late August, and has placed a moratorium on new agents and brokers while officials investigate the eligibility of the additional 419,000 enrollees.
“There will be no new brokers for Obamacare in this country for the next six months, and we do not feel at all conflicted about that decision, because most of the fraud, a disproportionate amount of the fraud, is taking place from these individuals,” Oz said.
The ACA — colloquially known as Obamacare — was passed in 2010 under former President Barack Obama.
And its baleful effects on health care and the federal budget live on…
California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden. To sustain the arrangement, the state imposes the nation’s highest tax rates.
In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime.
We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal aliens can enroll in public-welfare programs or receive benefits on their children’s behalf. In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year. The state’s shadow welfare system, it seems, shows no signs of slowing down.
Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.
“If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”
In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.
“If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the officer said of CalWORKs, the state’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”
These benefits add up. In California, illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health insurance, and various tax credits. Their children qualify for others, including CalWORKs and, as in other states, Section 8 rental subsidies. All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two U.S.-born children, and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year.
State leaders are proud of it. In a recent podcast episode, Governor Gavin Newsom bragged about his “controversial” decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encouraged people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program whose promotional materials assure applicants that “no Social Security number” is “no problem.”
Snip.
Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens. To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.
Medicaid is a good example. Federal law prohibits states from using federal dollars to provide wraparound coverage to illegal immigrants. So, California used a state-funding “bucket” within its Medi-Cal program to extend “full-scope” coverage to illegal aliens. The expansions enrolled some 1.7 million people, costing the state an estimated $10 billion annually—more than twice what the state legislative analyst originally projected.
California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.
Another way that California shuffles cash to illegal immigrants is through those aliens’ children. CalWORKs allows illegal-immigrant parents to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born kids. BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare clearinghouse, even tells applicants that the program will accept a “statement” that the applicant “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible” to qualify for the program.
This model—permissive rules and large loopholes—costs the state billions per year. As benefits and eligibility continue to expand, that figure will only increase in the years ahead.
California shows no sign of paring back this largesse. In 2022, Newsom signed a bill into law that extended taxpayer-funded food benefits to illegal low-income residents. Beginning next October, qualified Californians 55 and older will become eligible for that program, regardless of immigration status. California’s Legislative Analyst estimates that it could cost up to an additional $400 million a year.
Is there any doubt that California Democrats love illegal aliens far more than citizens? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
California Democrats pulled up the ladder to prevent the likes of Nick Shirley and local reporters like JJ Smith, Amy Reichert, and many others from finding out where millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars were fraudulently spent.
In my story, Karen Bass Feels Heat From Feds Over Millions in Stolen and Laundered ‘Homeless’ Funds, we learned that Bill Essayli, who’s supposed to be the U.S. attorney in Central California (LA area) but isn’t because John Thune can’t do his job, this week announced the arrests and indictments of four individuals who had stolen millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars. They were supposed to house and help the homeless, but they helped themselves instead.
After the indictments were announced and after the U.S. House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Authority operators to please come to Washington to have a little chat — under oath — the homeless authority announced it no longer wanted to receive federal funding and, in fact, plans to get out of the homeless business entirely.
Bass and the people in Los Angeles who have run this agency into the ground after bilking taxpayers for years are getting out of the homeless business.
The California Post reports, “LAHSA will not seek to retain responsibility for the annual application for federal homelessness funding, the Homeless Management Information System, the annual point-in-time count or the coordinated-entry system.”
The same federal funding that came from your pockets and mine. The same federal funding lost after these alleged California homeless advocates threw piles of cash in front of an industrial fan and pointed it in the general direction of people who deserve to be in prison.
Follow-up: “Satellite imagery shows significant damage to Moscow Oil Refinery after Ukraine’s drone strike yesterday. Multiple strikes are recorded and oil tanks confirmed destroyed. Additionally, a Pantsir booster intercepted a car.”
“Big JDAM Air Strike on Troop Concentration in Bilytske, Donetsk.” Early in the war, Ukraine couldn’t have carried out a JDAM strike, due to fears of Russian aircraft and SAM batteries, indicating serious Ukrainian degradation of those categories of Russian weapons.
More winning: “Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up.”
Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity. This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it’s the most utility shutdown events in the country’s recent history.
Even when Cuba’s grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time. Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff.
“Protocols are now in place to begin the gradual restoration of the system,” said Felix Estrada, an official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of the city remained completely dark.
Many exhausted residents of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.
“Yesterday I’d gone without power for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.
Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.
The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.
The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.
A linked story suggests it’s the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Greg Gutfeld is rightly upset that Austin’s commie twerp of a U.S. rep is more upset at an illegal alien getting shot than the murder of Andrew Wimsatt, an American citizen he theoretically represented.
On Labor Day a man, Andrew Wimsatt, was viciously murdered in an Austin Park – in an attempted beheading. This creep didn’t give two shits about it.
We often hear leftists accuse billionaires of buying government, and most times the accusations are at least partly off-base.
But not always, and sometimes they are literally doing precisely that: putting privately funded leftists into government offices to run a parallel government that nobody ever voted for. It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.
One such program, funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, placed and paid the salaries of “government employees” strategically inserted into Attorney General offices in Blue states, funding regulations and lawsuits aimed at targets that Bloomberg’s NYU-based NGO program identified as vulnerable to its pressure. The goal was, of course, fighting climate change.
BREAKING: Bloomberg-Backed Climate Group Paying Salaries of Democratic State AG Officials Quietly Shuts Down Amid Congressional, Legal Scrutiny.
“A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.”
Think of it as a cousin to “Zuckerbucks,” where a private entity funds a program that places people in government offices as either quasi- or fully government employees, with a mandate to pursue the NGO’s agenda. The same sort of thing happens with grants to news organizations, where an outside group pays for employees or “coverage” of specific issues, and the stories are still technically the product of the news organization, but the content is directed at producing the results desired by the people who cut the checks.
Snip.
Bloomberg, cut a big check to NYU, which in turn established a program to place its people directly into the offices of State Attorneys General, where they proceeded to sue and harass businesses targeted by the organization.
James Comer opened an investigation into the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, and out of the blue, it closed. He sought documents from it, and “poof!” It’s gone.
In my view, Angela Merkel bears a grave responsibility for the collapse of the centre and the growing ability of the political extremes to set the agenda.
The almost one-third of voters who would support Alternative für Deutschland in a national election are not fascists or Nazis. A substantial proportion are disillusioned CDU voters.
What has disappointed these voters? First, what I see as Merkel’s failures on so many fronts: immigration. Security. Energy. A sustainable strategy for business and economic growth. Digitalisation. Infrastructure maintenance. The list is almost endless.
Second, the extraordinary denial of reality that, in my assessment, Merkel allowed to take hold when it came to immigrants’ responsibility for antisemitism, violence against women, terrorism and gang crime.
Coming from Denmark, where we have reliable statistics on all these matters, I find it frankly shocking to listen to the nonsense coming from Germany’s political elite.
But I would also trace back to Merkel the rise of what is often called “Islamo-leftism” – a tendency that has recently gained ground in Sweden and is also growing in Germany. In Sweden, polls have indicated that 85 per cent of Muslim voters support parties to the left of centre, with almost one in five supporting the Left Party, Vänsterpartiet – a party tainted by antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism. I see no compelling reason to assume that the pattern in Germany is fundamentally different.
My argument, then, is that it is not only the rise in support for the AfD that can be traced back to Merkel. The same applies to the growing support for parties on the German left that promote the political and religious views of a significant proportion of the people, Merkel invited to Germany. Not least on the Gaza question.
Both Democrats and the international left has derided President Trump’s focus on Greenland, saying the U.S. controlling it was a fantasy. Now that he’s signed an agreement with Denmark, I doubt they’re laughing now.
The US-Greenland-Denmark agreement has now been published. I haven’t read it, but Arnaud Bertrand has. This is his analysis of the terms, which appear very favorable to the United States, and well calculated to achieve the goal of preventing undue influence over the Arctic by any hostile power.
Snip.
To sum up:
– The US secured a permanent military foothold that even an independent Greenland would inherit whether it likes it or not
– The US now has veto power over any non-NATO military presence in Greenland, and over who can invest in its strategic infrastructure and resources (beyond NATO and the EU)
– Denmark signed away its say over the principle of new US bases, with only the right to discuss the “implementation details”
– Danish authorities no longer set the rules for US military movement across the island
– And all of it is now justified by the defense of “the American continent”
Lindsay Clancy holdout juror Michael P. Desronvil speaks out.
Michael is a Catholic from a Haitian immigrant family and moved to Massachusetts when he was a young child.
The liberal women who so badly want to destroy him for refusing to acquit a child killer do not know how to handle that. Their woke brains simply cannot compute how to proceed.
Several jurors who wanted to let Clancy off the hook have claimed that Michael did not follow the jury instructions, but they have incriminated themselves with statements indicating they had an ideological agenda in the courtroom. Michael says he “kept getting cut off” by these other jurors, who apparently knew his own thoughts better than him.
This lines up with a statement from a fourth juror who says she was ultimately badgered into changing her vote.”
A female 4th juror comes forward and says the other jurors were pushing to acquit on *DAY 1*
In fact, a whole lot of basic jury procedures seem to have been discarded in the Clancy trial. “Lindsay Clancy jurors broke cardinal rule and used phones to RESEARCH killer mom during deliberations, holdout claims.”
“Feds arrest, indict hundreds in Trump voter fraud crackdown: ‘Catching it all over the country.’ The Justice Department says its crackdown on noncitizen voting and election fraud has already produced more than 200 arrests and indictments, with that number possibly doubling soon and state election officials themselves now facing potential charges for looking the other way.”
Since the Trump Justice Department warned state and local election officials that they could be charged with allowing fraudulent voting activities, more than 200 arrests and indictments have been secured in a crackdown on election fraud and noncitizen voting, and that number could double soon, a top official revealed to Just the News.
“I think there are a lot of nervous election officials because I think some of them know that they’ve been looking the other way when this is happening, and we’re catching it all over the country,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said Monday night in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.
Dhillon also hinted at further developments in the coming weeks, suggesting her department has developed evidence calling into question New Jersey’s claim that a computer glitch allowed thousands of foreigners to register to vote in that state and about 400 to actually cast ballots in violation of law.
“I’m not sure we have the correct numbers from New Jersey. They’re not really cooperating with us, and so we will get to the bottom of what happened there. And you know, New Jersey tried to blame a vendor for a mistake or a glitch, quote unquote. But you know, I think there’ll be another side to that story,” she said.
Snip.
Over the weekend, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that his agency is investigating 1,620 cases of voter fraud involving noncitizens and has made 151 arrests. He said his department is also looking into an additional 300,000 cases based on states’ voter rolls.
That thing that never happens keeps happening. “DOJ Charges 16 Noncitizens in Voter Fraud Cases.”
Howard Dean speaks to the ChiComs: “DNC Chairman Emeritus Howard Dean delivered the American welcome address at a China dialogue involving the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank identified in congressional commission testimony as ‘run by Chinese intelligence.’ The Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, which co-organized the event, has an equally explicit allegiance. Its charter says it: ‘upholds the comprehensive leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Ties between the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the proposed EPIC City development in North Texas came under scrutiny during a recent U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing chaired by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
EPIC City, which has been criticized as an Islamic enclave and housing development exclusive to Muslims, is a proposal from the East Plano Islamic Center.
The Wednesday hearing of the subcommittee on federal courts, oversight, agency action, and federal rights was titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.”
Sen. Cruz addressed the fact that Democrat senators failed to attend the meeting, stating that “their campaign is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America.”
Cruz heard from witnesses that alleged ties between CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and EPIC City.
Arielle F. Klepach, senior litigation counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center, called attention to the connection in her written testimony.
She likened the EPIC City development, later rebranded as “The Meadow” following significant backlash, to a pattern of “mega-mosque” building projects in Europe commonly motivated by “Islamist separatism.”
This movement is a “deliberate attempt to cut Muslim communities off spiritually, intellectually, and culturally from the surrounding secular society,” with the building projects in particular “generally [containing] community-like features such as schools, libraries, and gyms,” according to Klepach.
“The American version of this pattern is EPIC City,” Klepach said. “CAIR-Texas and CAIR-DFW have publicly defended EPIC City in the disputes, and CAIR’s national leadership has spoken at the EPIC mosque, reflecting an active advocacy relationship between CAIR and the EPIC religious community.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was designated a foreign terrorist organization by Gov. Greg Abbott late last year, along with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The hearing also revisited CAIR’s role as an unindicted co-conspirator to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). The foundation and five of its officials were convicted of “funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas” during a 2008 federal trial. CAIR was not charged in the case.
Lara Burns, senior research fellow for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, drew the connection between CAIR and Hamas in her written testimony.
“The United States Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee served as the original Hamas infrastructure in the United States, initially consisting of the HLF (the fundraising arm),” alongside others, according to Burns.
“At the [2008] trial, still today the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in American history, [various arms of the Muslim Brotherhood] were identified as unindicted co-conspirators/joint ventures as was [CAIR],” she added.
A father-and-son serial killer house of horror found in Pennsylvania.
A Pennsylvania father and son have come under suspicion after the son was discovered to be traveling with a woman with a fake ID that used the name of a missing woman.
Police searched the home of the man and his dad and found the most disturbing scene imaginable.
he investigation is still unfolding but this is some seriously unsettling stuff going on.
Here’s the latest from ABC 6 in Philly on the now 7 missing women connected to this case against Eugene Horsch and his deceased father RC:
Blair Tonzelli was 35 years old when she went missing in 2023. She was the first woman named in this case.
Police say when Horsch was arrested, he was with a woman in possession of an identification card with Tonzelli’s name on it. The woman allegedly told police Eugene Horsch gave her the ID.
Amy McHale was 44 years old when she was last seen in 2016. Shortly after news broke of Horsch’s arrest, her family told Action she was last seen at the W. Chew Avenue house.
McHale had previously been married to Ray Horsch, who has also become a central figure in this case.
Gabrielle Amarando was 22 years old when she disappeared in 2012.
A childhood friend of Amarando told Action News that loved ones grew increasingly concerned when they stopped hearing from her…
Roughly 14 years later, her family got the confirmation they were looking for.
In August, police said the women were seen in photos and videos recovered during the investigation, in which both are seen alive and then later appearing to be dead.
‘Based on the video and photo evidence — if the images in the video are real and not altered in any way, based on their review — the M.E. would believe the individuals depicted in the images are deceased,’ Philadelphia Police Inspector Ray Evers.
Maribel Fresses was the other woman seen in the videos and photos. She [was] 27 when she disappeared in 2018.
Police also saw photos and videos of two other unidentified women, both alive and then dead, as well as video of the elder Horsch strangling a woman to death.
Five urns believed to have the unidentified remains of five women were found in the home.
Millions of photos and videos have so far revealed that at least 7 women who went missing ultimately met their demise at the hands of the Horsches.
Shades of H. H. Holmes…
UK functionaries go out of their way to protect their precious illegal aliens. “British government mobilizes HUNDREDS of police and defense units to protect migrant boat from British protesters.”
Third World migrants are being led across the channel by French authorities, where British police then escort them into harbor, put them aboard taxpayer-funded coach buses, and give them a police escort with hundreds of officers.
Snip.
Earlier in the day, British protesters gathered by land and by sea to peacefully demonstrate against a group of 60 or so migrants that was set to land in southern England in Gosport.
Because of the protesters gathered along the coast, authorities had to scramble to find a new landing spot for the “newcomers.” The buses were seen with a massive police escort.
The reason for the escort was due to the fear that the British protesters would get “mostly peaceful” and attack the invaders or the masked bus drivers who are helping traffic them into the country:
One GB News reporter summed up the massive taxpayer expenditure that was spent to assist the migrants:
The whole thing from start to finish today, for this one boat of 60-odd or however many it turns out to be, to go all the way flanked by a massive French ship, then to our [Royal National Lifeboat Institution] boats, then all of those resources pumped into Gosport.
And THEN, it looks as though because of the local reaction, they’ve decided to not to that, take them down either to Eastport or Dover or somewhere else anyway.
So goodness knows what the resources are going to be like there.
We are talking MILLIONS of Pounds today alone, for a group of 60 illegal migrants.
Is there any doubt the Labour government prioritizes importing illegal aliens into the country over taking care of their own citizens?
Forget about Somali daycare fraud for a moment – have you heard about toddler fight club? A daycare in Fort Worth, TX is facing investigations and litigation after evidence showed staff abusing young children and forcing them to fight each other.
One mother, Heather Harris, knew something was wrong when she picked up her 4-year-old son at the Arka Montessori Academy of Risinger daycare. He was crying uncontrollably and was covered in bruises. Employees told the mother her son had fought with another child, but their explanations did not add up, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Harris and her husband, Richard Harris. She insisted on seeing the classroom’s surveillance footage.
The disturbing footage shows staff at the daycare swing a child around like a rag-doll and trying to force him to fight another child.
I’m skipping right past the obvious “First Rule of Toddler Fight Club” joke to point out that if my (theoretical) kid were forced into that, both daycare and the employees would be facing both a huge civil lawsuit and criminal charges.
More horrifying child abuse: “Transgender ICU nurse arrested on multiple counts of abusing NICU baby at Michigan hospital.”
[Kieran Ansley], a now-former nurse at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has been charged with child abuse after a 4-month-old girl in his [sic] care was found with multiple broken bones and bruising.
The injuries were noticed by the infant’s mother during an early morning visit in April, records show. Tests and a full skeletal survey found multiple fractures, including broken leg bones and multiple bruises, court records show. Bruising was found on the infant’s hands, arms, thigh, buttocks, abdomen and tongue, court records show.
‘The totality of the findings resulted in a diagnosis of pediatric physical abuse,’ court documents show.
More horrifying details snipped. Hell’s too good for him.
Dallas’ “Y’all Street” continues to capitalize on momentum as the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) enters a new era of growth.
North Texas has added a stock exchange alongside its iconic stockyards, and companies are beginning to flock to the TXSE’s transfer portal. TXSE opened in July, and September has seen the first corporate commitments and primary listing transfers.
On September 16, Texas Capital’s Texas Equity Index exchange-traded fund (ETF) and Texas Oil Index ETF became the TXSE’s first primary listings. The company’s CEO, President, and Chairman, Rob Holmes, rang the bell on “Y’all Street” to celebrate the company’s primary listing transfer. Texas Capital was formerly listed on the Nasdaq.
Holmes stated in a Bloomberg interview about the transfer, “Once this exchange came to fruition, it was our responsibility to look at the three exchanges and pick the best one for Texas Capital.”
He praised the TXSE’s investor base as an affirmation of the exchange’s technological and strategic innovation. The TXSE saw over $275 million in total investment, with major investors including BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Charles Schwab.
Competing securities exchanges include the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, both based in New York City.
Holmes asserted that TXSE’s net present value (NPV) is “better” than its New York rivals.
“On this exchange, instead of just paying a fee, we pay a fee, but at the end of the day we have a net cash position from the exchange,” he said.
If someone can explain what that last sentence means, please do so in the comments…
“Democrat candidate caught crying in the back of cop car after DUI arrest. Washington state Democratic House candidate Krista Perez was seen crying, praying and sobbing in the back of a patrol car after her DUI arrest.” Washington state has a jungle primary, with two Democratic candidates for House of Representatives District 29-Position 1 (the state has 49 districts of two reps each) facing each other in November, so Republicans won’t be able to take advantage here.
Jay Leno’s Law, exempting classic cars from California’s draconian emissions regulations, was signed into law in a rare act of sanity from Governor Hairgel. But note it doesn’t take effect until January 1, 2028.
We’ve been covering China’s “Ghost Cities” for over a decade here, vast, newly-built cities with sparse populations amidst empty condos and malls.
Now a guy with a video camera has revealed that a tower at the heart of the very real city of Shanghai (China’s largest, and the fifth largest in the world) is mostly empty, but lit up at night to look occupied.
Matthew Tye: “‘Look at the city at night. You see all this viral footage and stuff.’ And they go, ‘Let’s go inside some of these buildings, see what they look like.’ We took you inside one. I think it was in Chungdu where the guy went up all the floors and he’s like, ‘There’s literally nothing in here.'”
Winston Sterzel: “All of them were empty.”
MT: “But they have lights on, these very nice lights on. This guy took it a step further and he goes, ‘You know, I’m going to take you to Shanghai where everything should be full. Everything in the the Shanghai skyline should be being used for office space because this is a this is where you want to be in China.”
WS: “The most sophisticated, richest city.”
WS: “We’ve coined the term China is the land of shortcuts and facades, and this is a perfect example.”
WS: “I think probably 90% of tourists that go to China end up in Shanghai.”
MT: “Or Beijing.”
WS: “Beijing, Shanghai, one of those big ones. They know this, okay? So, they’re going to have a lot of foreign eyes on. So, they make sure that the the skylines look impressive.”
WS: “Know that when you go to these big fancy cities, you’re looking at a very curated version of what China Chinese government wants you to see. It’s not actually China. It’s like ‘This is our best face we’re going to put forward for you to see. Just don’t go behind the scenes.'”
Despite it being an office tower at the heart of one of China’s biggest cities, the elevator looks “disgusting” and dilapidated.
People “mix up Japan and China and think that they’re similar. They’re not even close.”
Fifth floor. MT: “It’s empty. It’s decrepit.” But the lights are on right near the windows to give the illusion of occupancy.
Tenth floor. WS: “They’ve got the blinds half down. So some of them are half down, some of them are half open. It gives that that impression that there’s like slightly dimmer, slightly brighter lights on the same level. So it gives you this idea that oh there, you know, people in there.
MT: “All fake.”
Eleventh floor: This one is occupied, but all the lights are on even though everyone has gone home. WS: “That’s probably going to be a mandate by the building management is that even when you go home, you don’t turn the lights off.”
MT: “We did see a mini documentary about Chongqing about how they’re telling up how cheap it is to run all these lights in this city to make it look impressive or whatever, and it’s definitely on a government level. It is part of the propaganda department in some way.”
MT: “This is like a gleaming hypercity, right? Where everything, the economy, is on the way up.”
Video on another empty floor: “A homeless person could just come up and sleep here.”
MT (sarcasticly): “Oh, but there’s no homeless people in China!”
WS: “There are. Everybody who is Chinese knows there are homeless people.”
Video: “Don’t automatically believe all that ‘interior glow’ stuff.
The video then shifts to show footage of a rural elementary school that’s been converted into a chicken farm, tying in to our previous posts on China’s population being vastly overstated.
Consider this another reminder that everything in China seems to be smoke and mirrors all the way down. Keep this in mind every time you hear how China is catching up to or outpacing the U.S. in AI, semiconductors, weapons…just about anything, really.
Shortcuts, facades and tofu dregs everywhere, and in everything.