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“The ordinance can be repealed the day after the election by the Austin City Council,” he said.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.
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…
