I’ve spent most of my working life as a technical writer, and most of that has been supporting enterprise software of one type or another. For the last couple of years I’ve been on the sidelines because venture capital has flooded into AI to the seeming exclusion of all else, and I have no direct AI experience. Now, thanks to AI, a large part of the software industry may be coming to an end.
The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.
The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn’t have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.
This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.
I say “almost” because there is going to be one way to maintain secrecy. Software as a service with the executable hiding behind a network connection to the cloud. But as of now, we must assume that anything shipped as an executable, or even a firmware image, is as transparent as glass. It won’t keep its secrets for any longer than it takes for somebody to be motivated to throw an LLM at it.
Snip.
There are still some obstacles. In US law, decompilation of a binary is a derivative work of the binary that falls under whatever copyright it had. However, it is also settled law that if you decompile binary code to a precise specification of what it does, then generate fresh code from that without looking at the decompiled stuff, you’re in the clear. This was the case law that allowed PC clones to exist, after Phoenix Technologies reverse engineered the original IBM PC BIOS.
The two-step process – binary to specification to unencumbered code – will no longer takes a large number of programmers and years of development time. With an LLM, it’s now a thing you can do in a day. Ubiquity will make it impractical to prosecute all the people who might skip the specification step.
Source code can also be covered by patents. You can be able to see their source code for a patented technique and not be able to use it without violating the law. Linux has evolved practices for dealing with this problem – one is not shipping patented video codecs, but requiring you to download them as plugins from jurisdictions where U.S. patents can’t be enforced. This presents patent holders with the impractical challenge of individually suing millions of end users, assuming it can even figure out who they are. To date, AFAIK, this has not been attempted.
I believe Raymond overstates the case a bit, as I bet AIs will find ways to obstuficate executables, but I bet that it will be true in enough cases to drain all the profit out of it for larger software companies that ship executables.
Forced migration from shipped binaries to tied cloud services will be tried – Adobe pioneered this, and Microsoft is pushing it as hard as they can given that their OS is a binary that has to run locally. Both companies are seeing massive user revolts over this. There is good reason to doubt that it’s a strategy that can hold customers in the long term.
However, most software these days doesn’t seem aimed at consumers, it’s aimed at other businesses, the bigger the better. I haven’t seen much if any revolt there. A whole lot of companies seem to have decided they don’t need to own their own software if they can simply have it in “the cloud” and pay a subscription that means they have lower startup costs and can offload the support headcount to a vendor. And it seems that increasingly, that software will be written by AI, tested by AI, probed for security holes by AI, documented by AI, and supported by AI. I wonder if companies will give their AI tech support Indian accents to make them more believable?
But Raymond and other Open Source advocates shouldn’t be so sure that this turn of events is good for their camp as well. Decompilation can just as easily be used to take Open Source executables and create private source clones of them in different programming languages for a variety of different purposes. Also, I suspect that using an AI to add features to Open Source products will be a lot cheaper than hiring an actual Open Source programmer. In fact, I would wager money it’s already being done.
But that’s not the only sign of AI’s threat to the existing software ecosystem. A man has cloned Adobe’s suite and is in the process of doing the same for Microsoft.
Days after unveiling free, open-source stand-ins for seven Adobe applications, Atlanta engineer Brandon Thomas has turned to Microsoft Office. This week he posted WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft – replicas of Word, Excel and PowerPoint – to GitHub, Tom’s Hardware reported. Thomas says he used Anthropic’s Claude to help build the software and is giving the results away.
The Adobe set came first. Gizmodo’s Mike Pearl reported on Oct. 7 that Thomas had used Claude Opus 5.5 and the Rust programming language to recreate Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and four other Adobe applications. Thomas wrote on Hacker News that they were in early alpha and “not anywhere close to ready,” while Pearl called the Photoshop stand-in “glitchy, but real.” Adobe, Pearl noted, agreed to a $150 million settlement after federal prosecutors sued it in 2024, alleging it was “trapping” people in subscription plans.
The Office clones followed within days. Paul Thurrott reported on Oct. 9 that WordCraft reads and writes DOCX files, and that ArtCraft, Thomas’s company, calls it 87 percent complete for ribbon commands and about 62 percent complete for real feature parity. For GridCraft, a pre-alpha Excel stand-in, ArtCraft claims 93 percent of Excel’s worksheet functions. DeckCraft, the PowerPoint stand-in, is said to cover about 79 percent of the feature set and to be 80 percent of the way to a first alpha.
Thurrott also reported that ArtCraft has removed the download links from its website, leaving GitHub as the way to get the code.
Gadget Pilipinas took a closer look at the project’s documentation and found some important caveats. WordCraft’s roadmap says charts, SmartArt and embedded OLE objects are lost when a DOCX file is loaded and saved, and validation against real business documents had not yet begun. The site also noted that counting ribbon commands measures whether a feature can be invoked, not whether it actually behaves the way Word does. It listed the licenses as Apache-2.0 or MIT. Release numbers differ between the two outlets: Thurrott reported version 0.3.0, while Gadget Pilipinas cited 0.5.0.
The larger target is the subscription model itself. When Microsoft added Copilot to its consumer plans in January 2025, PCWorld reported, Microsoft 365 Personal rose from about $7 a month to $10 and Family from about $10 to $13, with 60 AI credits a month included. Existing subscribers could remain at the old price on a “Classic” plan.
And the customer base is enormous. Microsoft last reported 89 million consumer Microsoft 365 subscribers in July 2025 and then stopped publishing the metric, according to Office-Watch, which estimates the total is now about 95 million. It also reported that consumer cloud revenue rose 24 percent in the quarter ended June 30.
Even as incomplete products, those efforts should put a chill through the hearts of Adobe and Microsoft executives. Plus, those two companies are among the most abusive in all of tech and richly deserving of their comeuppance, as Louis Rossmann notes.
“Adobe is a company that in 2022 said that our automated systems may analyze your content using techniques such as machine learning in order to improve our services and software and the user experience. So, they are using machine learning on your content to improve their system. In 2024, they also pushed out a terms of service update that allowed Adobe’s to have a right to, and I quote, access your content through both automated and manual methods. When Adobe did that, they did not give you any ability to opt out of this. There was no opt out button present anywhere. And if you wanted to get access to your session files again for the things that you were paying Adobe to be able to work on, your private files, you had to accept this update to the terms of service.”
” I think most of my audience, even the anti-AI people can agree that when a company routinely and repeatedly fucks over its customers for decades by turning software that you own into a subscription, by charging gigantic cancellation fees that are not very obvious, by trying to get access to your fucking content and not allowing you to say no to it, by increasing the price every single year, by not allowing you to activate the software that you’ve already bought and paid for, that when somebody comes along and uses AI to poop out a clone that does 99% of it for free. That’s pretty cool. I’m on AI’s side there.”
He covers more on the theoretical legalities of the move in relation to the DMCA and other federal law, so watch the whole thing if you’re interested in the details.
This is all great for people who hate Adobe’s and Microsoft’s user-hostile and anti-competitive practices, but the capabilities are fairly ominous for the software industry as a whole. It used to take a year or more for a dedicated programming team to churn out even a basic clone of a popular software product. Now one guy with sufficient AI tokens can do it in less than a week. (And don’t get me started on the whole “token economy” BS, which is an entirely different rant.) Given that, the desire to fund new software startups is going to be deeply disincentivized.
It’s ironic how the one thing AI has proven good at is replacing the jobs of the software engineers that helped create it.
Before the 1980s, hardware was king in tech. Chips and computers were expensive, and software was merely a way to sell more hardware. Then a variety of software companies (Lotus, Microsoft, Adobe, Boreland, Ashton-Tate, Intuit, etc.) managed to build business empires worth many multiples of their higher cost software brethren, a trend that only accelerated with the arrival of the World Wide Web. (Apple is a special case, in that their software still exists to drive hardware sales.) Now, thanks to the AI boom/bubble, it’s hardware and AI companies generating the huge valuations, with software profits under threat.
Just as in previous tech revolutions, I’m sure someone will figure out how to build business empires on the top of AI tools, but just like the Internet circa 1988, no one has figured out just how yet…
If you’re wondering “Who gets to decide which foreigners are going to be imported into towns and neighborhoods to boost Democrat election chances,” one answer is “George Soros.”
“enable local governments and private entities to sponsor immigrants directly”
That is what the Niskanen Center, a Washington think tank whose immigration program receives Soros-foundation backing, wants policymakers to do. The instruction appears in its November 2025 immigration blueprint.
Two weeks later, Niskanen published a county-by-county migration index, identifying hundreds of American communities as potential destinations for newcomers. Its proposed applications include planning where refugees and asylum seekers could settle.
The agenda reaches straight into the question of who gets to shape your town: which places should receive newcomers, which private actors should help sponsor them, and how arrivals could be encouraged to stay.
Niskanen’s own funding disclosure lists $300,000 from Open Society Foundation for immigration work, covering September 1, 2024, through February 27, 2026. That period includes the release of both proposals.
George Soros founded Open Society. The same Niskanen disclosure lists another $400,000 from Carnegie Corporation of New York and $100,000 from Migration Policy Institute for immigration work, with grant terms also spanning the publications.
Your county, scored for immigration
The Migration Match Index report describes communities with:
“aging, stagnant, or insufficient native labor supply”
Its model screens unemployment, job openings, rental vacancies, affordability and age. Older residents and available apartments become indicators that a community could accommodate more migration.
Maybe Niskanen had a hand in importing all those illegal aliens working at plants in near-slave-labor conditions we kept hearing about.
The authors explicitly discuss using updated data to plan resettlement following:
“an influx of asylum seekers at the border”
Translation: We want cheap illegal alien labor that will vote for Democrats once we amnesty them. Just like Chuck Schumer admitted.
Welcome Corps, the private refugee-sponsorship program established during the Biden administration.
The same annual report promotes the new migration index as guidance for policymakers, employers and local leaders. It identifies no agency using the index to place people.
Niskanen’s April 2025 retrospective explains the employer pathway in the separate Welcome Corps at Work pilot. Refugee candidates interviewed with U.S. businesses. A job offer led into resettlement processing and matching with a private sponsor group in the employer’s community.
Niskanen reported that 12 employers extended offers to 23 refugee candidates. Those figures count job offers, not confirmed arrivals.
Call me a stickler for due process, but I don’t think immigration policy should be taken from the federal government and given to random businesses.
A town’s future should require more than a vacancy rate and a donor-funded recommendation.
Here’s a map of the places they want to import illegal aliens:
Funny how in the Democrat-dominated west coast there’s only two counties total targeted for California, Oregon and Washington. Why, it’s almost like they don’t need to flip those states blue.
There’s a list at the end of the article listing every county. For Texas, the list is “Cottle County; Dimmit County; Edwards County; Gillespie County; Hartley County; La Salle County; Parmer County; Potter County; Upton County; Ward County.” Potter County is home to Amarillo, and Gillespie to Fredericksburg, but all the rest are under 12,000 people. The sort of places you could change the demographics of rapidly if you started air-dropping illegal aliens in.
The Talafreako Mystery was fun while it lasted, but the trans-loving Tim Waltz of Texas has recovered from whatever mysterious monkeypox/scabies outbreak/mental breakdown [See below] that had sidelined him for 10+ days and is back to inflicting himself on the public again.
After nearly two weeks away from in-person campaigning because of an illness, Texas Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico was spotted Saturday night at a Kacey Musgraves concert in Dallas, where video showed him enjoying the performance and meeting the Grammy-winning singer.
The appearance at American Airlines Center came a day after Talarico returned to public campaigning Friday at Austin City Limits Music Festival. He disclosed Sept. 30 that he had been diagnosed with the flu after visiting a Dallas urgent care clinic. His last in-person campaign event before the illness was a Sept. 28 fundraiser in New York with actor Robert De Niro.
There’s still something weird going on, though, as there’s all of one in-person event for Talarico, a CNN appearance October 14, on his campaign schedule, and if you hit “Next Page” you just see the exact same block walking, table manning events, etc. repeated over and over again; they seem to be looping the same page to give the impression of activity. A strange circumstance for a campaign that has all the money in the world. By contrast, back when Ted Cruz was first running for the senate, he was regularly doing 10-14 in-person events every day. I remember two Cruz staffers ravenously devouring chicken nuggets at a Williamson County event because they hadn’t had time to eat all day. As with just about everything Talarico does, something is off here.
Finally, the blackpilled, gloom-and-doom crowd is wrong about Talarico being the favorite, as the usual campaign home-stretch poll flip just happened.
With 10 days until early voting starts in Texas for the midterm elections, a new poll suggests momentum may be shifting back in Republicans’ favor in two key races.
A new UMass Lowell/YouGov poll, released Oct. 8, shows Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico tied at 45%, with 7% of respondents undecided.
“The last time Democrats won a U.S. Senate race in Texas, Ken Paxton didn’t yet have a law degree and James Talarico wasn’t even born. With the race tied, anything can happen between now and the election,” said John Cluverius, director of survey research for the Center for Public Opinion at UMass Lowell.
Snip.
The poll found that Paxton leads among voters over 65, 58%-38%, while Talarico leads among younger voters, ages 18 to 29, 49%-37%. Hispanic and Black voters are also breaking for Talarico over Paxton, 48%-42% and 67%-17% respectively.
67% of black voters is disasterous for Talarico. In the 2024 Texas Senate race, exit polls showed some 84% of Texas black voters pulling the D lever, and Colin Allred still lost to Cruz by over 950,000 votes. Jasmine Crockett voters still don’t seem to have warmed to Talarico, and may just sit out the midterms. “A black community organizer named Durrell Douglas asked other black residents in Houston, Texas, what they thought about Talarico, giving the New York Times a very candid anecdote. ‘There’s no pulse,’ Douglas told the Times. ‘No energy.'” Also, in 2020, black Democrats seemed to be the key cogs in committing the deep blue city election fraud that put Joe “LOL 81 Million Votes” Biden over the top in 2020, and it seems unlikely that they’ll be willing to stick their necks out to put Talarico over the top.
Remember, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke had a lot better organized and energized campaign in 2018, and he still lost to Ted Cruz by 200,000 votes. And O’Rourke was a lot better at fashioning himself into a convincing simulacra of an actual human being than vegan, “trans-kids loving” Talafreako. Factor in polls constantly overstating Democrat support, and Ken Paxton still has a very good chance to be the next senator from Texas.
Don’t get cocky. But cut out the gloom-and-doom as well.
Obviously, the “six more years of communism” refers to the DSA and social justice continuing to infect the Democrat Party…
🚨 BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Ohio mental hospital CONFIRMS James Talarico was discharged from the facility earlier this week
The “flu” thing was a BIG FAT LIE
Following reporting by @SaraGonzalesTX and @CarolineWren, a hospital employee told @RheinAmacher and I that Talarico had in fact been a patient at the Lindner Center of Hope near Cincinnati, Ohio, which specializes in around-the-clock mental health treatment.
While I sympathize with those dealing with mental health crises, this man is CLEARLY not suited to become a US Senator representing over 30 MILLION TEXANS.
The job doesn’t get easier after being elected — it only gets MORE stressful.
And Talarico clearly can’t handle it.
I pray he gets the help he needs, but Texans need a real representative they can rely on.
For decades, everyone in tech has known that Microsoft was abusing the H1-B visa system to illegally import low-wage foreigners (mainly Indians) to do their programming rather than pay American programmers prevailing wages. The Trump Administration is finally doing something about it.
President Donald Trump’s administration announced Thursday it was suspending Microsoft and several other firms from a program allowing foreign workers to apply for green cards, as it also lashed out at universities that bring international students to the U.S. on exchange programs.
The announcement by Vice President JD Vance marks the latest swing from the Trump administration at employers and universities that welcome foreign students and workers into the country.
Funny how the Trump Administration assigns tasks to Vance when they want to Get Stuff Done, while President Autopen assigned Kamala Harris to tasks where they didn’t want her to do anything.
Supporters of the Republican president have long argued that various programs like H-1B visas — which Vance accused Microsoft of abusing — essentially empower American companies to recruit foreign workers for jobs that end up undercutting Americans. In the wide-ranging announcement, Vance and other top administration officials also called out universities over their use of J-1 visas for international students and information technology outsourcing firms.
Snip.
Vance says US workers are replaced with ‘foreign indentured servants’
Vance said the program from which Microsoft is being suspended requires companies to advertise jobs in America before applying to the Department of Labor to show they need to give a foreign worker a green card because of a lack of American workers.
“They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.
The tech employment market is also plagued with “ghost jobs,” where the same companies keep reposting same jobs over and over again without hiring anyone. I’m not sure if this is linked to H1-B visa abuse, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”
Microsoft is No. 5 among U.S. employers when it comes to using H-1B visas, according data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Amazon is No. 1.
Vance said Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.
“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said in a White House news conference announcing the decision. “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers.”
Vance said H-1B workers are effectively foreign indentured servants because if they lose their jobs, they have to leave the country, and they earn less than Americans in the same position.
Snip.
Ron Hira, a Howard University political science professor and longtime critic of the H-1B program, called the move against Microsoft “very significant.’’ Hira noted the White House last month issued a little-noticed executive order directing government agencies to “implement appropriate measures to protect American workers from abuse of the H-1B program and ensure that the program serves the national interest.’’
“There are supposed to be protections for U.S. workers that say: If you hire an H-1B, you are promising that you are not adversely affecting similarly employed U.S. workers,’’ Hira said. “That’s never been enforced.’’
Besides Microsoft, Vance said the government was similarly suspending Adobe and tech consulting firms Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini. The companies did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Been an interesting day. While I wasn’t looking, a giant branch cracked and fell onto my driveway. I park in my garage, so nothing was harmed, and it was relatively easy to haul the branch to the other side of the driveway to trim down for trash.
This week: Stephen Green takes a look at fraud in the Los Angeles Homeless Industrial Complex, Minnesota can’t go a week without more reports of Somali fraud and/or violence, Ukraine starts hitting Russian data centers, more of that illegal alien voting fraud that never happens, Ft. Hood jihadi shooter gets a firing squad, Vietnamese man arrested for selling “roof rabbit,” and an all-Lamborghini drag race.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Stephen Green: “You’ll Never Believe How L.A.’s ‘Ambitious Effort’ to Fix Homelessness Totally Failed.” Oh, I bet I can.
Five years ago, a coalition of the usual lefty pressure organizations — public labor unions, progressive activist groups, and “housing advocates” — pushed for a citywide ballot initiative called United to House L.A. or ULA.
Here’s the initiative that made the ballot in 2022: “Shall an ordinance be adopted to add a tax on the sale or transfer of real property valued at over $5 million to fund affordable housing and tenant assistance programs?”
It passed, naturally, because voters like to feel good about themselves for doing their bit to promote “affordable housing and tenant assistance,” while feeling even better about not having to actually pay for any of it. Set a cap at “soak the rich level,” and you’ll be amazed at how altruistic people become with other people’s money.
It was billed as a “mansion tax” to fund low-income housing.
Over at the L.A. Times way back when, staff writer Benjamin Oreskes actually led with “an ambitious effort to address the homelessness crisis,” because the paper wasn’t at all pushing a lefty agenda. No, sir-ee.
Meanwhile, RAND warned in 2022 that “the revenue raised by Measure ULA may disappoint,” pointing to “the city’s Affordable Housing Linkage Fee — a 2018 program that amounts to a tax on new market rate housing construction to fund affordable housing construction — suggested that it would raise $100 million per year. However, the actual revenue to date has been around one third of that amount or lower.”
Supporters claimed the “mansion tax” would raise $900 million a year, or $2.7 billion over its first three years. “Instead,” the New York Post reported this weekend, ULA “brought in about $1.2 billion.” That’s less than half the expected revenues, nearly three years after passage.
Snip.
The Post also reported that ULA “blocked the building of 9,100 homes, wiped out 16,650 full-time construction jobs and cost $452 million in revenue.” So ULA might have raised $1.2 billion, but at the cost of nearly half a billion in lost income taxes, and more than 16,000 jobs.
And that affordable housing? Still hasn’t happened: “The City has barely touched the cash, spending just $114 million as of May — less than 10% of the money raised,” the Post reported, but no new affordable housing units have been built.
For Democrats, big pots of money that never get used for their professed purpose is the goal.
Also Stephen Green: “Look Inside the Luxury Tower Housing L.A.’s Homeless Bureaucracy.”
A California-based independent journalist going by InnerRhythmMedia — think of him as Nick Shirley 2.0 — recently looked into the headquarters of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, and what he found looked more like a multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley firm than a joint city-county government project.
Snip.
As broken down by Wall Street Apes on Tuesday, LAHSA “is headquartered in a luxury high rise building where employees enjoy VIP amenities like a fitness center, rock climbing wall, an infrared sauna, a cold plunge, and a helipad.”
And the pay? Oh my, the pay:
Chief Executive Officer, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, $491,908
“The Congressional Budget Office estimates roughly 1 million lawfully present immigrants will lose eligibility for Affordable Care Act subsidies by 2034, while about 100,000 could lose Medicare coverage. The Center for Medicare Advocacy says some Medicare terminations are expected Feb. 1, 2027.” Good. People shouldn’t move to America to go on welfare.
“FBI thwarts ‘Minnesota man’s’ jihadi plot to shoot up Mall of America.” “‘Minnesota man’ Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud was apparently looking to shoot up America’s most famous shopping mall.” Why, it’s almost like importing unassimilated Somalis into the American heartland has negative consequences…
The ATF admits that the ruling in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF applies to everyone.
Effective October 9, 2026, ATF will no longer require individuals to seek ATF approval under the NFA before making or transferring short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, silencers, and “any other weapon[s]” as defined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(e). ATF will also no longer require such items to be registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. These policies apply uniformly to anyone otherwise subject to these requirements, not just to the plaintiffs.
However, it’s not all sunshine, silencers and kittens: “The injunction does not disturb the NFA’s application to machineguns and destructive devices. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act maintained the $200 tax on such items. Consequently, all NFA provisions still apply to machineguns and destructive devices.” And state laws for the same items still apply. (Hat tip: Gun Owners of America.)
“Iran’s Economy ‘Deteriorating Rapidly,’ Regime’s National Security Chief Rezaei Admits. Iran’s currency hits new historic low, trading at 2.7 million rials to the dollar.”
The Iranian economy is “rapidly deteriorating” under the weight of President Donald Trump’s Operation Economic Outcast, the regime’s national security chief Mohsen Rezaei said. The admission comes six weeks after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent launched a sweeping sanctions campaign to cut off the regime’s global commercial and financial access.
Since President Donald Trump threatened Tehran with an “Economic D-Day” in August, the regime has struggled to break the U.S. naval blockade or find buyers for its oil. “This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY, and we need all of our Allies to stand with the United States of America to isolate, and defeat, the Iran threat,” he wrote on Truth Social in August. “These maniacs are on the ropes, and these HISTORIC MEASURES will cripple them and their ability to project terror worldwide.”
Just months after boasting that Iran would ‘neutralize’ U.S. sanctions, Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad has been forced to leave the office. “Iran’s oil minister has resigned days after allegations that an intermediary trust selling Iranian oil abroad owed millions of dollars’ worth of export receipts to the state,” The Guardian reported on Monday. “Mohsen Paknejad’s departure comes as Iran grapples with a dire economic situation, including inflation running at 85%.”
The Mullahs would rather the Iranian people starve their give up their dreams of nuclear weapons.
“Ukraine Attacks Key Pumping Station Near Moscow.” “This is connected by product pipelines to the Ryazan and Moscow oil refineries, and then also connects the major airports of the Moscow region.”
“Followup: “Su-34 and Su-35 Confirmed Destroyed At Khanskaya Air Base.”
Interesting development: Montenegro detained “Mikhail Zvinchuk, the founder of the pro-war Russian military-blogger network Rybar, along with his wife and three associates. Rybar often supports Russia’s war aims while reporting battlefield weaknesses that the Russian Defense Ministry downplays, including Ukrainian strikes on supply routes serving occupied Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea…Zvinchuk is under UK and EU sanctions and is on a U.S. wanted list tied to alleged election interference.”
Remember that Top Gear episodes where the lads tried their hands at driving 18-wheelers, and Jeremy Clarkson drove to the finish line blithely unaware his rig had caught fire? Well, thanks to a Ukrainian drone, a Russian truck driver just recreated that scene in Crimea.
More than 1,600 convictions have been secured by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Child Exploitation Unit as part of its efforts to combat online predators and child pornography.
According to figures released Tuesday by the Office of the Attorney General, the unit has made 278 arrests for online solicitation of a minor, resulting in 214 convictions. Another 610 arrests for possession of child pornography have resulted in 1,410 convictions. Numerous cases remain pending.
The figures were released as part of an update on the attorney general’s law enforcement operations.
Snip.
Paxton’s Human Trafficking Unit has separately made 373 arrests and secured 126 convictions, with several cases still pending.
The attorney general also announced that the office’s Fugitive Apprehension Unit has now made 18,291 arrests since its inception, including 68 individuals on the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Top 10 Most Wanted List.
“‘Worst of the worst‘: Latest ICE roundup nabs pedophiles, animal abusers.”
“Yesterday, the brave patriots of ICE arrested pedophiles, animal abusers, drug traffickers, and other public safety threats from our communities,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement. “Even while facing a more than 1,600% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line, ICE will not be deterred. Illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S. We will find you, arrest you, and remove you from our nation.”
Topping the Wednesday roundup was Edis Canales-Montoya of Honduras, who was convicted of sexual conduct against a child.
Gonzalo Sanchez of Mexico was convicted for possession of child pornography and driving under the influence.
Carlos Arturo Zelaya-Argueta of El Salvador was convicted of sexual abuse of an animal and drug distribution.
Manuel Gomez-Lopez of Guatemala was convicted for the manufacture/delivery of a controlled substance.
Jesus Garcia-Serrano of Mexico was convicted for obstructing a criminal investigation and for unlawful possession of handguns.
That thing that never happens happened again. “Federal grand jury indicts 10 immigrants in Minnesota for illegally voting in US elections.”
Today we are announcing that a federal grand jury returned an indictment against 10 foreign nationals who have committed unlawful voting and registration offenses in the state of Minnesota. In total, the grand jury’s indictments include 9 counts of illegal voting by an alien, and 9 counts of making a false claim of citizenship in order to register to vote.
Charges include illegally voting in the general elections of 2022, 2024, and the primary elections of this year, of August 2026.
The defendants that have been charged include foreign nationals from Brazil, Ghana, and Liberia.
MS NOW’s Morning Joe aired the second installment of its midterm series, “The Voter Files,” on Tuesday. Network contributor Elise Jordan spoke with a panel of black voters from Wayne County, Michigan, who had backed Rep. Haley Stevens in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. Their remarks did not bode well for Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.
The consensus was that the far-left El-Sayed has wrongly taken black support for granted. Panelists said he assumes that because black voters typically vote Democratic, they would set aside their reservations, and vote for him — no outreach required.
One woman noted, “I think he’s taken advantage that we, as black people, are Democratic, and he thinks we’re gonna vote for him anyway, and I’m like, ‘No sir.’”
“I’m gonna have to put uncommitted down on that little circle and move on,” she added. “If you’re going to Congress to represent me, I need you to talk about what’s going on in this community.”
Another woman on the panel felt El-Sayed had missed opportunities to let black people know who he is. “We don’t understand him,” she said. “We don’t know him.”
I wonder how much resentment is based on the unspoken assumption that he’ll be directing graft to Muslims rather than blacks…
The Department of War (DOW) issued a press release September 29 announcing the latest change the Trump administration is making at U.S. service academies, including West Point and the Naval Academy. In order to keep the academies “laser-focused on lethality and readiness,” there will no longer be any civilians appointed to tenured positions at the academies.
“This directly addresses the critical issues of academic stagnation and complacency that are often associated with tenure, and which threaten to dilute the academies’ primary focus on warfighting and tactical dominance,” the DOW press release argued.
This will necessitate a major hiring adjustment, and I would not be at all surprised if the Trump administration ends up in court over this simply because judges seem to interfere with everything this administration does, particularly if it undercuts bloated bureaucracy
“Death by U.S. Army Firing Squad Approved for 2009 Fort Hood Gunman.” “Nidal Malik Hasan, a former U.S. Army psychiatrist, was convicted on 13 counts of premeditated murder in 2013 after he fired at soldiers and one civilian inside the Soldier Readiness Center, a medical facility, on the west side of the U.S. Army base on November 5, 2009. Hasan caused 13 deaths and injured 32 others before being shot and captured alive, although he was paralyzed from the waist down as a result.” I don’t think they’ll have any problem getting soldiers to volunteer for the firing squad.
President Donald Trump weighed in on France’s ongoing school protest crisis on Tuesday, arguing that the unrest reflected broader concerns about immigration and integration.
In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!”
Conservatives have only been warning about unassimilated Muslims in the French banlieues since the 1990s…
“Quebec Elects Separatists Vowing To Break From Canada.” Well, that will come in handy 30 years or so hence to resettle French natives fleeing the new Paris Caliphate…
TSMC planning to build a fab in Texas? This is speculative and preliminary, and Musk has already denied TSMC will help run Terafab, but the move makes a lot of economic sense for both parties. Plus fabs employ a whole lot more people than data centers.
Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner interview William Shatner. Not always geared to my interests, but there are some nuggets. And holy crap, Shatner looks great for someone who’s 95.
The Honest Trailer for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Dwight sent over this story about a formerly pregnant tranny “man” who got mag-dumped by his inlaws (“who took turns shooting him”), but trying to make sense of it just made my brain hurt.
President Donald Trump swung through Texas yesterday, and he had some choice words for the Democrat’s 2026 senate nominee.
President Donald Trump rallied thousands of supporters Wednesday night, delivering a nearly two-hour speech that included repeated attacks on Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico.
The rally at the Freeman Coliseum came less than a month before the November 3 election, with Trump urging Republicans to turn out for Attorney General Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate campaign and several congressional races.
Throughout his remarks, Trump repeatedly referred to Talarico as “Talafreako,” criticizing his record on immigration, energy policy, and child gender mutilation.
“A vote for Talafreako is a vote to turn Texas into a dirty, failing, third-world country,” Trump told the crowd, contrasting that with his support for Paxton.
Trump also questioned Talarico’s recent absence from public campaign appearances.
“Where is he? Where the hell is he?” Trump asked.
Paxton raised the same issue during his remarks earlier in the evening, telling attendees that Talarico had gone 11 days without making a public appearance.
Paxton then led the crowd in a chant asking, “Where is James Talarico?”
With just 28 days remaining until he faces off against Republican candidate Ken Paxton, Democrat James Talarico is nowhere to be found.
Talarico has not been seen publicly in Texas in over a week, with his last appearance occurring on Saturday, September 26, before he took a fundraising trip to New York City. There, he was treated to a VIP fundraising dinner where attendees, like a filmmaker who labeled America a “shithole” and a group that advocates for child sex change surgeries, were charged $27,000 a plate.
That group would be the Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group that takes money from George Soros. For all that Talarico has tried to back away from his professed love for transing your kids, he sure does seem to be firmly on Team Child Mutilation.
On Wednesday, September 30 Talarico was slated to speak with the U.S. Hispanic Business Council in the Rio Grande Valley, but instead joined virtually from a hotel because “his staff says he’s ill and was unable to travel.” During the appearance, Talarico claimed that he was forced to seek care at an urgent care clinic in Dallas, but social media users have disputed the timeline offered by the candidate.
Guy’s 37. How sick would he have to be to go to “urgent care?” At that age, I never got so sick that I required “urgent care,” though I did go to the emergency room a couple of times (a bike accident and slicing open my thumb trying to cut through a frozen bagel).
Then, on Friday, October 2, the Talarico campaign chose to recycle footage from a February 22 rally before Talarico had even won the Democrat nomination, and tried to pass it off as current.
Next, his campaign cancelled an event slated for October 5 with the Central Texas African American Civic Engagement Symposium. The campaign has offered no explanation as to why the event was suddenly canned.
The campaign once again cancelled a planned appearance for October 6, at a grassroots Final Austin Fundraiser.
Guy lives in Austin and can’t even make it to events in Austin? Something smells.
The event was advertised as an opportunity for “neighbors, organizers, and supporters from all corners of the community to gather” and prepare for the final stretch of the election season. When attempting to RSVP for the event, interested parties are told that the event has been rescheduled and are offered no details as to when the new date may be.
The campaign calendar currently shows no scheduled public appearances for Talarico.
Trump also mocked Talarico’s vegan diet, joking about the Democrat’s recent public appearances eating barbecue and hypothesizing that had made him sick and unable to campaign.
The president criticized Talarico’s legislative record, accusing him of opposing border security measures, restrictions on illegal immigration, and protections for the state’s oil and gas industry.
“Talarico voted three times against walls. He doesn’t want a wall,” Trump said.
Trump also accused Talarico of changing his positions now that he is running statewide.
Paxton echoed that argument, telling attendees that Talarico’s views had shifted since the general election campaign began.
“Do you all believe his voting record or what he’s telling us now?” Paxton asked.
The attacks came as Trump sought to energize Republican voters ahead of an election in which his own name will not appear on the ballot.
“Pretend that I’m on the ballot,” Trump urged supporters. “Because they’re going to destroy everything that we’ve done.”
He specifically encouraged attendees to support Paxton, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and Carlos De La Cruz, the Republican candidate running against Democrat Johnny Garcia in the newly redrawn 35th Congressional District.
Trump praised Paxton as one of the country’s leading attorneys general and predicted he would become an influential member of the U.S. Senate.
Other Republican congressional candidates speaking at the event included Brandon Herrera and Chris Gober, along with attorney general candidate Mayes Middleton and Patrick.
Gober is the only one of those I’m not familiar with. He’s running to replace retiring Michael McCaul in the Texas 10th Congressional District, a Republican-leaning district that, post-redistricting, stretches all the way from Austin to east Texas.
We keep hearing how polls show Talarico with a thin lead over Paxton, but his campaign sure isn’t acting like it. Right now they’re acting like every time Talarico speaks, his poll numbers go down, so they’re going to try to hide him to run out the clock.
Sometimes two stories come out demonstrating different aspects of the same issue. First President Trump announced stricter SNAP eligibility requirements.
Families applying for food assistance through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will, beginning Thursday, face changes to payments, eligibility requirements and how the benefits are administered.
Most families will initially see a slight bump in their monthly payments to support grocery purchases from a cost-of-living adjustment, but in the coming months, households will face stricter eligibility requirements, meaning fewer people will receive the benefits, ABC News reported.
Under new work requirements imposed by the “The Big Beautiful Bill Act,” able-bodied adults ages 18 to 64 who don’t have dependents will be required to work. Previously, the age limit was 54. Families with children age 14 or older are no longer exempt from the work requirements.
The “The Big Beautiful Bill Act” also requires states to pay for a larger share of SNAP administrative costs, and states with SNAP recipient error rates above 6% will be required to fund a portion of the benefits themselves.
Second, Nick Shirley demonstrates just how easy it is to commit EBT card (Electronic Benefits Transfer, the primary means by which welfare recipients receive and spend SNAP benefits) fraud.
“Food stamp fraud. A type of fraud that steals from the poor and hungry and has become one of the easiest fraud schemes in America.”
“How many people I’ve seen sell food stamps to get their hair done, nails done, their toes done, buy an outfit to go to the club, drugs. A lot.”
“More than 42 million Americans receive food stamps and over 100 billion dollars from your taxes fund this program.”
“With over 250,000 stores accepting food stamps, it’s become one of the easiest programs to defraud. And it’s actually pretty simple. Each month, the government funds people’s food stamp cards with a certain amount of money, and then people will trade the money on the card at a discounted price.” A guy with $306 on his EBT card offers to sell it for $120 cash.
“The food stamp card is essentially just like an ATM for a lot of these homeless people here inside of Seattle.”
“There’s a a foreign person usually and they’ll take the money to buy food for cheaper.” “So a foreigner will come in and offer somebody cash for the EBT.” Evidently committing Food Stamp fraud has become another of those jobs Americans won’t do.
EBT cards are so ubiquitous you can find them lying on the ground in homeless encampments. “Some of these folks who use these cards, they’re trying to sell them or trade them and they just forget about them, so they just throw them. So, you have hundreds of dollars on the streets, if not thousands of dollars worth of food stamp cards, and you can find them in almost any encampment.” Maybe here’s another clue as to why the left loves homeless encampments: They help facilitate EBT fraud, which offers another chance for the Homeless Industrial Complex to cash in.
“So, people can buy these for cash and then that drug addict will then actually have the money to buy his drugs.” “Yeah. And that’s the problem, right? You can’t buy drugs with food stamp cards. So, these have to be sold for pennies on the dollar. They’ll take whatever cash and they’ll immediately go to their dealer, who’s on pretty much every single corner here.” Is fentanyl really only 50¢ on the streets of Seattle? No wonder heroin use is declining.
There are several minutes of negotiating with various Seattle street people. Everyone seems aware of the scam.
They go to a Asian-owned store where they try to run a charge of $120 for a can of spam and a plate of prepared sushi. The woman who leads them there seems to be from Vietnam.
The video ends with Shirley’s team ending up in a brawl with a bunch of Seattle street people. “Nick, if I didn’t see you on the street here running right now, I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t know where you would have gone. You’re being targeted right now. Everyone’s saying Nick Shirley’s here. Nick Shirley’s here.”
Food Stamp fraud is evidently an industry, and the people running it don’t like it being threatened by any nosy citizen journalists…
“Wife endorses husband for office” wouldn’t normally be considered news. But when both husband and wife are politicians, and the two are in the process of a messy divorce for (to quote one of the parties) “Biblical grounds,” then yes, it’s news.
State Sen. Angela Paxton (R-McKinney) apparently wants her husband, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, to be the state’s next U.S. senator despite their pending divorce, according to a new campaign ad.
“People have asked my thoughts about this election, and it turns out I have some. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” she begins.
That “elephant” is that she filed for divorce from her husband in 2025. In a post on X at the time, Paxton wrote that she was seeking the separation on “biblical grounds.”
“I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation. But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage,” she added.
The ad was notable for running across the country during the Houston Texans-Dallas Cowboys football game. According to ad news firm Medium Buying, it was cheaper to buy national airtime than in Texas’ individual major media markets.
That’s an interesting nugget of campaign spending information.
According to a court filing, Paxton alleged that her husband had committed adultery as grounds for the divorce. During Ken Paxton’s 2023 impeachment trial, it was alleged that he was having an affair with a subordinate, Laura Olson. In separate court filings, Paxton denied the affair and all allegations of wrongdoing related to the impeachment. Divorce proceedings are still ongoing.
While Angela Paxton is seeking to end the marriage, she still implied support for her husband’s U.S. Senate candidacy — even though she did not name him in the ad — saying: “In a general election, it’s not as much about the individual players on the team; it’s about getting the whole team across the finish line.”
“Either we hold every Republican seat, or we hand the future of Texas to the other team. I’m voting for the Republican ticket on November 3rd,” she says.
The message echoes what Angela Paxton told a gathering of the Texas Federation of Republican Women in Round Rock on September 22. In a speech she gave called “The Elephant in the Room,” she encouraged voters to support the Republican ticket “even if we’re mad at them.”
There’s holding your nose, and then there’s really holding you nose.
Paxton’s public record as Texas Attorney General has been absolutely stellar, filing lawsuit after lawsuit against both federal overreach under Obama and Biden and corporate malfeasance that violates Texas law. As I’ve said many a time before, I say about Paxton what Abraham Lincoln said about Ulysses S. Grant: “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”
Now that Angela Paxton has said to vote for the man she’s filed divorce papers against, Texas Republicans (and sane independents) should put aside any reservations they have about Paxton’s private life and get out to vote for him in November.
The Talafreako menace is too serious to let that “trans kids” loving nightmare anywhere near the senate.
Another election year means another batch of propositions for Austin citizens to vote on. Most are the usual mix of bonds and bad ideas, but Save Austin Now has managed to get Proposition I, a proposal to perform regular audits of the city budget, on the ballot.
One year after defeating a massive tax hike proposal, Austin voters will decide this November whether to lock in regular audits of city finances through a charter initiative that is facing opposition from a government employees’ union.
Proposition I resulted from a citizen petition organized by the Save Austin Now PAC, a group that successfully worked to defeat a proposed 20 percent tax rate hike in 2025. This year, the PAC’s petition effort collected more than 20,000 signatures to place the proposed “Independent Affordability & Efficiency Initiative” (IAEI) on the ballot to mandate hiring an independent and experienced audit firm through a competitive bid process.
Under the measure, the selected auditing agency would analyze the spending, performance, and outcomes of all city departments and contractors to identify opportunities to streamline and optimize staffing and management structure and identify fraud, waste, abuse, and conflicts of interest.
The IAEI analysis would also include an examination of how city policy, such as tax rates, affects resident affordability.
Attorney and former Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire, who drafted the charter amendment, told The Texan that voters sent a message to the city council last year in rejecting the property tax increase, but that Proposition I “would make the message permanent.”
“That message is ‘enough,’ and that their taxes are too high,” he said.
Aleshire noted that the ballot initiative differs from an ordinance approved by the city council in February 2026.
“The ordinance can be repealed the day after the election by the Austin City Council,” he said. “But the charter amendment is basically the people telling the city council that they must have this new audit process, and therefore it’s also enforceable by the voters, and it cannot be changed without another vote of the public.”
Under the charter amendment, the auditor must benchmark the cost of city government to measures of resident affordability, and audits must be completed every five years and within one year of any future tax rate increase elections.
While the city is not required to publish documentation supporting audits under its new ordinance, Aleshire also pointed out that the charter amendment would make all drafts and supporting materials available to the public.
The selected contractor would also have to identify annual and multi-year savings that exceed the cost of its own work.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson has called the charter amendment a “political move” and argued that the mandate to identify the savings presents a conflict of interest for the auditing firm.
The charter amendment has also drawn opposition from the local chapter of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The union’s president, Brydan Summers, said in a statement that the proposition is “just the latest attempt from Save Austin Now to force its right-wing agenda on our city.”
Of course Democrats and unions hate the idea of audits, because that would show just how deep they’ve shoved their hands into the cookie jar:
Remember the entire “Reimaging Austin Police” lunacy? The entire purpose of that charade was to take money out of the hands of law enforcement and put it into the hands of radical leftwing organizations, almost all of which just happened to have members on the “reimaging” task force.
No wonder they don’t want audits. For every situation where leftwing activists are sticking their snouts into that giant trough of taxpayer money we’ve caught, there are probably dozens of instances we haven’t. So expect every social justice Democrat at every level of Austin government, and every left-leaning NGO in the city, to come out full bore to defeat Proposition I at all costs.
Fifty U.S. troops assisted Ecuadorian officials in arresting more than 30 members of a Mexican drug cartel.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and U.S. troops participated in an early-morning operation on Thursday to arrest members of a branch of Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), Ecuadoran Interior Minister John Reimberg wrote on X.
Around 70% of the world’s cocaine passes through Ecuadorian ports, according to the Congressional Research Service. This trade is worth an estimated $30 billion a year, according to Ecaudorian President Daniel Noboa.
Around 320 Ecuadoran police officers and 50 personnel from U.S. Southern Command took part in the operation, he said.
Reimberg said the arrests followed an eight-month investigation. Over 30 Ecuadorans were arrested for allegedly belonging to the group with a “direct connection to the CJNG,” Reimberg wrote on X.
He added that the group “was engaged in the collection, intermediation, distribution, transportation, and marketing of large quantities of drugs originating from Colombia”
He said the drugs would have then “be shipped by sea from the ports of Guayaquil and Machala to Central America, the United States, and Europe.”
“The operation continues in development,” he said.
Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Roberto Kury said close cooperation between Ecuador and the U.S. has delivered “a lot of positive results” in recent months.
“We have found many drugs and shipments through this cooperation, so it’s very positive for Ecuador,” Kury told Fox News Digital at the U.N. General Assembly this week.
The Trump administration has made cracking down on drug cartels in Latin America a key priority.
President Donald Trump has said the U.S. is in “armed conflict” with cartels in Latin America, adding that repeated strikes on boats that the Army has undertaken in the region are a necessary escalation to stem the flow of illegal drugs purportedly harming Americans.
Successful efforts to mitigate border crossings through the southern U.S. have been one of the administration’s biggest victories.
Earlier this year, American commandos and Ecuadorian troops participated in a joint mission to dismantle a suspected criminal hub on the Ecuadorian coast. The two countries are closely allied and the U.S. is a large Ecuadorian trading partner.
Ecuador has been a hot spot in the drug war since 2024.
The drug war has long been thought to be unwinnable, but Democrats also swore up and down that the border was unsecurable as well. Here, as in so many areas, the Trump Administration refuses to be bound by conventional wisdom. CJNG has American blood on its hands, and the U.S. has been partnering with Ecuador to fight the drug trade since 2025.
Can the Trump Administration make a dent in the cartel drug trade? Possibly, as several South American nations seem onboard with the program, and the real narcoterrorist nations (Venezuela, Cube) are either turning or on their last legs.
But actual victory in the War on Drugs seems to be as elusive as ever.
