Hinojosa: Give Me All Communication Between Musk And Abbott. Appeals Court: LOL, No

Posted on October 29, 2026 by Lawrence Person

Given all the attention paid to the Texas senate race, you could be forgiven for forgetting that Texas also has a gubernatorial race this year, with Republican incumbent Greg Abbott expected to handily throttle his little-known Democrat challenger, state rep Gina Hinojosa, en route to Abbott’s record-breaking fourth term election as governor. But while she’s still theoretically in election contention, and a state rep, Hinojosa decided that would be a great time to demand all the communication between Elon Musk and Abbott, because that’s a totally normal request and not an outburst of far left Musk Derangement Syndrome.

Appeals court: LOL. No.

The Fifteenth Court of Appeals has blocked a district court ruling that would have granted Democrat gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa access to communications between Gov. Greg Abbott and Elon Musk.

Travis County District Judge Catherine Mauzy, a Democrat, had ordered the governor’s office to allow Hinojosa to read more than 1,300 pages of unredacted communications between Abbott and Musk.

Bloomberg Law reported that Mauzy donated $500 to Hinojosa on June 24 for her race against Abbott, and more than $700 to Hinojosa’s campaign for the Texas House in 2016.

Hinojosa claimed her request was for transparency: “The people have the right to transparency, and that’s why I’m continuing to fight for the documents between Elon Musk and Greg Abbott.”

However, Mauzy’s order did not give Hinojosa permission to share confidential information with the public.

Instead, she argued that Texas law gives lawmakers the power to inspect government records. Hinojosa is currently a sitting state representative whose term expires in January.

The 1,300 pages of communications allegedly involve Musk’s Texas business interests, school tax breaks, broadband infrastructure, and state grants.

According to KVUE, court documents argue that Hinojosa, whose term ends January 12, 2027, “is suffering present, continuing, imminent injury” because she has not been granted access to the requested communications between Abbott and Musk.

Abbott’s office stated that the district court’s order would have allowed Hinojosa to use her office to violate state public records laws.

“This was a sham lawsuit in a rigged district court,” said the governor’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris. “The trial court judge refused to follow the law and rubber-stamped an illegal fishing expedition into the Governor’s Office. The appeals court rightly froze this abuse of process.”

Though Hinojosa’s gambit was thwarted, I can’t help thinking there’s a grand bargain to be made here. Elon Musk can share his communication with all Republican office holders…as long as George Soros, Neville Roy Singham and all their minions do the same for all Democrat office holders.

Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

AI Bubble Bursts…In China

Posted on October 28, 2026 by Lawrence Person

Many people have long predicted that the AI bubble will pop. Indeed, the AI bubble has already burst, and taken a good chunk of the stock market with it…in China.

Stocks on China’s mainland have lost about $2.4 trillion in market value, the total worth of all their shares, since May, as investors lose faith that Beijing’s AI boom will ever turn a profit.

That is more than South Korea’s entire economy produces in a year.

AI companies now make up 42% of the market value of Chinese shares listed on the mainland and in Hong Kong, and 57% of trading, according to Goldman Sachs. So when AI stocks fall, the whole market falls with them.

The CSI 300, an index of China’s 300 biggest listed companies, entered a bear market on October 22, meaning a drop of at least 20% from its peak.

The sharpest damage hit Shanghai’s STAR 50, an index of 50 large tech and chip companies. It fell 40% in less than four months, erasing about $480 billion.

It still trades at roughly 100 times earnings, a ratio that shows how many years of current profit investors are paying for, down from nearly 250 at its peak. The Nasdaq 100, the U.S. tech benchmark, sits around 30.

100 P/E ratio is an insanely high valuation. Right now Nvidia, a real company that sells real chips to AI companies, has a P/E ratio just over 27. Berkshire Hathaway, one of the most capitalized non-tech companies in the world, has a P/E ration of 14.8.

DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, released a cheap and powerful chatbot in January 2025, and Nvidia, the U.S. company whose chips power most AI, lost nearly $600 billion in market value in a single day. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, also produced by a Chinese AI lab, sent chip stocks tumbling again in July.

Beijing then pushed its tech giants toward homegrown chips: According to the Financial Times, its internet regulator reportedly told companies including ByteDance and Alibaba to stop buying Nvidia chips in September 2025. Z.ai, a Beijing lab, says it trained its GLM-5.2 model entirely on Huawei chips.

Analysts blame weak spending by Chinese consumers and doubts that AI companies can earn back what they have invested. Robot maker Unitree drew retail orders for 8,000 times the shares on offer when it listed in August, and its stock has since lost almost half its value since launch even after a significant recovery this week.

Having 42% of your stock market’s value tied to AI companies seems extremely dangerous from the git-go. Thank God the American stock market isn’t so dependent on one sector. Oh, wait. This report in April says that 45% of the S&P 500 value is in AI-linked stocks.

And the biggest AI IPOs haven’t even happened yet.

But back (for the moment) to China. China’s economy has long been shell games all the way down, and there’s no way at this remove to figure out which Chinese AI companies are real and which outright scams. What real growth China has enjoyed is largely attributable to making goods to sell to Americans (and on the world market), but I don’t see terribly many Americans trusting their data to Chinese AIs over American models. (And I don’t even trust American AI companies.)

A whole lot of gloom and doom news has been coming out of China, with factories closing to vacancies across Shanghai to unemployed young people pretending to still go to work to avoid telling their family they lost their job. China’s stock market has lost $2.4 trillion, but at such elevated PE ratios, it still has a long way way to drop to seem rational.

American AI-linked companies have their own issues, but Nvidia, Broadcom (P/E 43.5), Alphabet/Google (16.5) and Microsoft (29.4) aren’t trading at nearly the insane multiples Chinese companies are. Even if the American AI bubble bursts (as it almost certainly will), they don’t have nearly as far to fall. That may change if Anthropic and OpenAI pull the triggers on their long anticipated IPOs. The Dotcom Bust meant about $5 trillion in stock losses (or just under 60% of the 8.45 trillion President AutoPen added to the national debt), and an AI bust would likely be around the same scale, if not worse.

If I were to consider investing in the stock market right now, I might consider American companies that actually make physical goods…

Posted in Communism, Economics, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Texas Election Tidbits And Down Ballot Recs

Posted on October 27, 2026 by Lawrence Person

It’s been one of those months where I: A.) Felt like I was constantly busy, and B.) Still got very little accomplished. The Halloween season and the run-up to the election are part of that, but I’m still dealing with cataloging a large library of books, including sending out another Lame Excuse Books catalog this month, and the blog updates necessitated by the PHP vulnerability, and clearing a large tree limb that fell onto my driveway (now gone), in addition to all the usual slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

All that is a preamble to saying that what you’re getting today is a random selection of some pre-election tidbits.

  • Williamson County early voting locations.
  • Travis County early voting locations.
  • Austin’s Proposition I, the proposal for regular independent audits of Austin City government, is pulling in opposition spending from national unions.

    Extreme concentration from two organizational sources
    AFSCME + Austinites for Equity = ~89% of the money. There is only one individual household contributor. This is not a broad grassroots effort; it is a small number of large institutional checks.

    City employees’ union is the dominant funder and organizer
    AFSCME (the national public-sector union) provided the single largest gift. Local AFSCME Local 1624 (City of Austin and Travis County employees) has been the public face of the “Don’t DOGE Our Austin” rallies, with union officers speaking and signs prominently displayed. Reporting indicates the Don’t DOGE PAC shares the same treasurer (Carol Guthrie, AFSCME Local 1624 business manager) and office ties as Austinites for Equity and the local union. Austinites for Equity itself previously received large AFSCME contributions (reported around $50,000). This creates a tightly interconnected funding and control structure centered on the union whose members’ departments would be audited.

    Out-of-state money is the largest single source
    The majority of funds came from AFSCME headquarters in Washington, D.C., rather than from Austin residents or local small donors.

    • I’m pretty sure just about everyone reading this blog (bots and opposition researchers excluded) is going to be voting Republican straight down the line. So here are some down-ballot “non-partisan” race recommendations for my neck of the woods.

  • For Williamson Central Appraisal District Place 1, Clint L. Stephenson is a Republican and thus the choice here.
  • For Austin Community College District Board Of Trustees:
    • Place 1: Dana Walker is the choice here, because her opponent is endorsed by Democrat groups.
    • Place 3: Trevor Hale is the choice, for the same reason.
  • For Round Rock ISD board, vote for The TAG Team, namely:
    • Troy J. Evanovich for Place 6
    • Miriam Arora for Place 5, and
    • Gregory Andrew for Place 4.

    All three are endorsed by True Texas Project, and their opponents are the usual social justice warrior Democrats.

    For North Austin MUD #1, Jennifer Wiebe is the choice in the only contested race, because I voted against Diana Christiano for her signs appearing with Dem signs, and Wiebe evidently donated to Trump, which is a good enough reason to vote for her this far down the ballot.

    • Posted in Austin, Elections, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    Police Officer Steals Dead Man’s Identity, Home

    Posted on October 26, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    You hear about identity theft all the time, but usually a police officer isn’t the one doing the stealing.

    A Florida police officer who found a man dead during a welfare check in 2022 is accused of taking possession of the man’s home and impersonating him for years while fixing up the place, authorities said.

    The officer said he took possession of the property weeks after discovering the homeowner’s body to “prevent squatters from taking control of it,” according to a court document he filed.

    “Smell test” failed.

    Investigators in South Florida have accused Lauderhill police officer Brian Sguros of carrying out a “complex scheme” to take control of the $400,000 home. They say he made it appear the man was still alive by using his identification to pay taxes on the property and obtain permits to make repairs.

    Sguros was arrested this week and charged with five felonies, including official misconduct and criminal use of deceased personal identification. He appeared in court at a brief hearing on Wednesday and then dashed away from reporters outside.

    Messages seeking comment were left Thursday with one of his attorneys and Sguros, who has been suspended from his job.

    Court documents in a related civil case show that the officer’s attempt to take possession of the two-story house in a tidy neighborhood just outside Fort Lauderdale became known after a real estate group bought the house from the man’s relatives in 2025.

    Sguros said in an affidavit that in August 2022 — less than a month after he found Dennis West dead inside the Lauderhill home — he took possession of the property and spent the next 2 1/2 years making repairs, spending more than $200,000 of his own money.

    So not only did he commit fraud, his fraud is going to lose him $200K.

    He said the house had been filled with trash, that its roof was partially collapsed and that the structure was unstable.

    Sguros said in another court document that he took over the property “believing that by cleaning, securing, and restoring a dangerous and abandoned residence he was acting lawfully and responsibly to protect the surrounding community.”

    Sure he did.

    He argued that he made no attempts to hide what he was doing.

    But investigators with Broward County Sheriff’s Office said the deception began when the officer told the county medical examiner that he was friends with West, who had died of natural causes, and that the man had no family, which was not true.

    Sguros paid taxes and utilities at the home in West’s name, and forged his signature to get permits for work at the home, the sheriff’s office said. Investigators said Sguros also used his access to law enforcement databases to find information about West.

    Usually the way this sort of fraud works is that someone stealing the dead person’s ID keeps cashing their Social Security or disability checks. That sort of fraud can be profitable until you get caught. But stealing a crappy house and putting your own money into it in hopes you won’t be detected (deeply unlikely, given how much paperwork goes into real estate transactions) isn’t.

    Committing a crime that involves years of negative cash flow offends both Florida law and Dave Ramsey.

    And what did this house look like?

    There’s nothing about that house that screams “jackpot” to me. And if it’s after he put $200,000 into it, it still looks like crap.

    Crime doesn’t pay. Especially poorly thought-out crime…

    Posted in Crime | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

    Paxton Sues OpenAI Over ChatGPT

    Posted on October 25, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    Another week, another Ken Paxton lawsuit.

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, on Friday.

    A press release announcing the legal action said: “OpenAI has failed to protect Texans, including children, from the many harms of relying on its artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT.”

    “A virtually unknown concept outside of science fiction until a handful of years ago,” the lawsuit begins, “AI now accounts for over a third of U.S. market value.” According to Paxton, those gains were not earned, but came from a “web of deceit and the exploitation of users.”

    The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI violated two Texas laws: the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices—Consumer Protection Act and the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act.

    The SCOPE Act, passed in the 88th Legislative Session in 2023, was intended to prevent digital service providers from entering into user agreements with minors without parental or guardian consent. The law has faced several legal challenges, and was recently partially upheld by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals regarding age verification.

    On the first count, Paxton alleged that OpenAI deceptively marketed its flagship product ChatGPT regarding its “safety, accuracy, and reliability.” Because of this, the lawsuit says, “mass shooters have been aided and abetted in deadly rampages, vulnerable people have been encouraged into suicide, professionals have suffered public humiliation, users have lost critical thinking skills, and minors have become addicted to a tool that feigns human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight.”

    Regarding the SCOPE Act, Paxton alleged that ChatGPT lacked required age verification.

    The lawsuit also seeks to hold OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally liable for the alleged violations “and the deceptive statements he has personally made regarding his firms’ products.”

    OpenAI (which is not an open source company or product at all) is certainly among the slimiest of AI companies, but Paxton faces a number of legal hurdles for the lawsuit to actually succeed in a court of law. The first is that OpenAI’s own terms and conditions state that “You may not use our Services for any illegal, harmful, or abusive activity,” which theoretically offers a certain amount of legal indemnification for end users misusing your product in violation of said terms. The terms also address the underage issue, stating “Minimum age. You must be at least 13 years old or the minimum age required in your country to consent to use the Services. If you are under 18 you must have your parent or legal guardian’s permission to use the Services.” That may or may not be considered sufficient to address the “access control” issue. Those same terms and conditions also specify binding arbitration when using their products, which is going to provide another hurdle to overcome in a lawsuit. Thirdly, if you’re using a product for free, it’s going to be hard to convince a court you have standing to sue them, as you have not entered into a commercial contract (actual or implied) with that company.

    All that said, the Attorney General for the State of Texas is a very different category of plaintiff than the average Joe Schmoo, which probably addresses the standing issue. But even given that, it will be much more difficult to hold Altman personally liable for the actions of his company. Paxton will have to prove that Altman knew his product was defective and said that it wasn’t, rather than offering up a piece of beta software for free on a “use at your own risk” basis.

    Of course, carrying a lawsuit all the way through to judgment is far from the only purpose of filing it. Forcing OpenAI to more rigorously enforce SCOPE Act controls and pay a sizable fine (as Paxton has successfully done with numerous other large companies) is probably a more likely endgame. Facing a litigant with such deep pockets as the State of Texas may be a powerful motivator for a company that might possibly want to go public in 2027 to settle sooner rather than later.

    Given the possibility of discovery unearthing many unappetizing details about just how the AI sausage is being made, I would expect OpenAI and Altman to settle with Paxton, or likely Texas AG successor Mayes Middleton, sooner rather than later.

    Posted in Technology, Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Crappy New Theme Active!

    Posted on October 24, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    A side effect of the PHP upgrade is that my ancient, Basic Bitch WordPress theme won’t work any more.

    I’m not wild about this, and resent being forced to update to anything with a remotely modern aesthetic.

    But this will have to do until I can sit down and pick something more suitable…

    Update: Made the color this garish red just so it wasn’t that bland pastel whatever-it-was. I may end up trying a variety of themes…

    Update 2: Changed to another theme because the last one I changed to wouldn’t give me a sidebar. This one is a lot closer to meeting my needs, but I still need to replace the default image with something else.

    Update 3: I also need to edit the single post template to kill the bio underneath.

    Update 4: Changed the header image to a cropped American flag. What I would like is a regular-sized American flag with the red and white stripes stretched to the desired length.

    Also need to add tags and categories back to the sidebar.

    Update 5: Added back my old sidebar by messing with widgets. Now how the hell do a delete the automatic bio addition on single posts?

    Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

    This Day Eaten By PHP

    Posted on October 24, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    So I previously wrote about the critical PHP bug that needs patching. Well, today BlueHost did something about it, without asking, with the side effect that BattleSwarm was down hard several hours today. This was less “Physician, heal thyself” than “Physician, you’re behind on your shots, so we’re going to tie you down to the table and jab them into you.”

    And the fix is Not. Quite. Right. Yet.

    And Futuramen is still down.

    So consider this an interim post to Keep The Streak Alive, as there may be more downtime to come before all this is resolved.

    Stay tuned…

    Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

    LinkSwarm For October 23, 2026

    Posted on October 23, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    Ex-USAID Democrat operatives plan an insurrection, more Democrats behaving badly, two really stupid criminals that openly announce their intention to murder people, more welfare state/SNAP fraud, and Minneapolis restaurant trying to prove socialism works is shocked to discover socialism doesn’t work.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Are Democratic operatives looking to stage a color revolution over the midterms?

    I’m not sure how to start this story, so we are DIVING IN.

    This week, conservative analyst DataRepublican released transcripts, videos, and audio from groups including ex-USAID and national security officials (all Democrat) coordinating to provoke Trump into invoking the Insurrection Act after the 2026 midterms.

    Their plan is simple.

    1. Get Democrats to take control of Congress in the midterms.
    2. Ramp up coordinated, color-revolution riots across the nation, forcing Trump to use the Insurrection Act and the National Guard to quell leftist violence.
    3. Use Democratic governors and congressmen to declare Trump illegitimate and hold a “Third Continental Congress” to rewrite the Constitution and make America communist.
    4. Engage in eternal Marxist revolution.

    Here is a clip of far-left leaders, including former USAID diplomat Danielle Reiff, talking about enacting “extraconstitutional” measures to create “the kind of transformation” the Marxist revolutionaries want.

    I think we have an opportunity – I think the midterms, especially if there’s a meltdown around the midterms in a crisis of legitimacy, could be a real window of opportunity for us to say, ‘Okay, some red lines have been crossed, but what we really need to do is transform our system.’ But in order to do that in November and take advantage of the meltdown scenario, we have to get super, super organized in the next seven months. So I think this is a plan that needs to be on steroids.

    …

    The conversation that we’ve started more broadly is what happens if we need to go extraconstitutional to create the kind of transformation that we’d all like to see. And so, we’ve talked about a sequence of, like, an important convening. Maybe like a Third Continental Congress that actually comes up with a declaration that says, ‘Here are the red lines. If these red lines in our democracy are crossed, we will move into an extraconstitutional process…

    Sounds awful insurrectiony, doesn’t it!

  • “A top Virginia Democrat is facing charges in connection with an alleged bribery, marijuana distribution, and money laundering scheme. Virginia State Senator L. Louise Lucas was charged with five federal offenses involving a cannabis business she co-owns, according to an indictment filed in the Eastern District of Virginia. Those charges include racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute marijuana, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy to commit honest-services fraud and maintaining a drug-involved premises.” Also indicted: Two of her daughters and a nephew.
  • “Oregon dad ignores gun-free zone, stops school shooter who also ignored gun-free zone.” More. 
  • “Declassified Documents Show Ukrainian Diplomat Was Set to Testify About Hunter Biden Before US Revoked His Visa.

    A former Ukrainian diplomat who was at one point set to give negative testimony about Hunter Biden’s business links appears to have wrongly had his visa to the United States revoked, according to newly released documents.

    The White House Task Force on Government Transparency and Election Integrity released the information to reporters late Wednesday about the State Department and Treasury Department taking action in 2020 to revoke the visa of Andrii Telizhenko, the Ukrainian diplomat. Telizhenko had worked for the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington.

    Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin had called him to testify in early 2020, shortly after the first President Donald Trump impeachment, regarding the president’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump inquired about then-former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s links to the energy company Burisma.

    Democrats accused Telizhenko of promoting Russian disinformation.

    Records showed that Telizhenko was friendly to the Obama administration and was opposed to the administration of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

    Federal agencies were not able to establish an evidentiary basis for claiming he was tied to Russia, according to an administration official. A Trump administration official said the records show it was based on “assumptions and newspaper articles.”

    There’s no greater crime than opposing the criminal actions of a Democrat in power. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • More on the “lying to protect Hunter Biden” front: “DOJ Charges Two Former FBI Agents With Lying to Congress About Hunter Biden Probe. The former leaders of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force allegedly misled Congress about their knowledge of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the bureau’s investigation.”

    The Department of Justice charged former FBI agents Nikki Cole Floris and Bradley Benavides for allegedly lying to Congress about their involvement in the Hunter Biden investigation.

    “This morning two former FBI members of the now dissolved Foreign Influence Task Force, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, were taken into custody – charged with allegedly lying to Congress in 2023 on matters regarding investigations related to the 2020 election. One of these individuals is on record privately claiming to be ‘running a shadow government’ during the 2020 election,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “As we’ve said repeatedly: weaponization will never be tolerated at this FBI. We have already dismantled the corrupt CR-15 squad that engaged in political weaponization targeting their opponents, including President Trump – and anyone who abuses their position of public trust will be held accountable.”

    According to the statement of facts, witnesses and documents, Floris and Benavides played active roles in FBI investigations into Hunter Biden between December 2019 and September 2021.

    “In October 2020, both Floris and Benavides worked on the FBI’s internal and Congressional responses to reporting on the FBI’s receipt of Hunter Biden’s laptop, with Floris receiving, discussing, and passing along updates on the investigations through late 2021.”

  • HUGE Drone Strike Hits Saint Petersburg: Data Centre, Ozon Warehouse, Oil Terminal, Bridge All Hit!”
  • “Satellite Imagery of Saint Petersburg After Drone Strike: Oil Terminal, Oil Depot, Ozon Warehouse.” Some big damage, but little visible damage on the bridge strike.
  • And more: “Big Damage Confirmed to Saint Petersburg VK Data Centre.”
  • “Satellite Imagery Shows Big Damage to Vladimir Yandex Data Centre.”
  • “Russian Su-30SM Crashes in Kaliningrad.”
  • Turnabout is fair play: “Ukraine Carries Out Underground Operation Near Kupiansk! Advances 15km Through Pipe.”
  • “A data center operated by Russia’s Federal Tax Service was attacked in Gorodets, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.”
  • “Ukrainian naval drones are becoming mobile air-defense platforms, exploiting the multipurpose Sargan-3000, which is capable of carrying up to four-hundred-and-fifty kilograms of payload and operating as far as one-thousand-and-six-hundred kilometers from its base.”
  • Patrick Boyle argues that the Yandex strikes didn’t slow down troll or bot traffic appreciably. 
  • Ukraine takes out one of North Korea’s longest range self-propelled artillery vehicles being used by Russia.

    The Koksan is North Korea’s longest-range conventional tube-artillery system and one of the most unusual weapons Pyongyang has supplied to Russia. Western intelligence first identified the system in 1979 near the North Korean city of Koksan, which later gave the artillery piece its commonly used Western name.

    The original M1978 Koksan can reportedly strike targets at ranges of up to roughly 40 kilometers with standard ammunition and as far as 60 kilometers with rocket-assisted shells. Its rate of fire is relatively slow at around one to two rounds every five minutes, but its long reach allows it to operate well behind the immediate front line.

    The weapon’s gun is mounted in an open configuration, providing little protection for its estimated four-to-six-person crew.

    The earlier model also requires a separate vehicle to carry ammunition because of the size of the weapon and its shells, while the later M1989 variant can carry around 12 rounds onboard.

    Like much commie Wunderwaffen, it sounds like more of a pain in the ass to use than a real difference-making weapon.

  • “Polling firm Wedgewood Polls admits to completely fabricating election polling for the 2026 midterms.” And three of four senate race polls (including Texas) they released showed Democrats ahead. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • “FBI arrests ‘Most Wanted’ fugitive in India who stole $600k in food stamps.”

    A fugitive accused of stealing more than $600,000 in federal food stamp benefits has been returned to the United States after being arrested in India last month, FBI Director Kash Patel announced.

    Manjit Singh Bedi, one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Fraudsters, was wanted on federal charges stemming from an alleged Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fraud scheme at a grocery store in Tacoma, Washington.

  • “Georgia Instagram personality Shawty Dred indicted on $4 million SNAP card fraud scheme.”

    An Atlanta social media personality has been arrested on federal charges for allegedly stealing millions of dollars in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by using fraudulent accounts, prosecutors say.

    Mercedes Reshard New, who goes by “Shawty Dred” on social media is accused of taking more than $4 million meant to feed poor Georgia families to fund his lavish lifestyle.

    According to investigators with the U.S. District Attorney’s Office of Northern Georgia, New allegedly controlled more than 350 SNAP accounts created using false identities between 2020 and 2026, having the electronic benefit transfer debit cards mailed to multiple addresses around metro Atlanta.

    New also allegedly applied for his company, Shawty Dred LLC, to become an authorized SNAP retailer, allowing him to use the cards for purchases.

    The USDA revoked Shawty Dred LLC’s authorization in 2025, and local police arrested New shortly afterward for allegedly selling SNAP benefits, prosecutors say. The officers seized 14 EBT debit cards, which he promptly requested replacements for.

    In all, federal prosecutors say that New tricked the Georgia Division of Family & Children Services into giving him around $4.6 million in SNAP benefits, which he was able to siphon $4 million from accounts. All the while, prosecutors say he had flaunted flying on private jets, posing with luxury vehicles, and calling other people “broke motherf****s” on social media.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • The Democrat Party is proving they are exactly who we thought they are. “Democratic nominee for Wisconsin Secretary of State says her ‘number one priority’ is giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.”

    JoCasta Zamarripa: My number one priority is to see the governor sign driver’s licenses for undocumented Wisconsinites into law … Driver’s licenses for undocumented Wisconsinites is going to improve the public safety for all Wisconsinites. Whether they’re fifth generation US citizens or whether they’re newly arrived immigrant because it’s going to be more folks with a driver’s license driving on our roads.

    Her number one priority! Nothing is more important to her than this!

    Not crime reduction. Not the economy. Not affordability. Not jobs. Not even giving the Wisconsin Badgers the NIL money to become relevant in college sports again.

    Just your regular reminder that the average Democrat candidate, even in the conservative-leaning Midwest, wants to invite the entire world to live in America and fundamentally destroy the land built by our forefathers.

  • “Comptroller Huffines Bars Taxpayer Funding for Discriminatory DEI Programs.”

    Comptroller Don Huffines has issued an executive order prohibiting taxpayer funds administered through his agency from supporting discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

    The order requires contractors and grant recipients working with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts to certify that their state-funded activities do not involve discriminatory DEI practices. Agreements will also include provisions allowing the agency to terminate contracts immediately for violations.

    Under the order, discriminatory DEI practices include preferential or unequal treatment based on race, color, ethnicity, religion, age, sex, or national origin in recruitment, hiring, contracting, program participation, or the use of state resources.

    “The radical left turned diversity, equity, and inclusion into a racket, and taxpayers got stuck with the bill,” Huffines said. “Woke DEI is discrimination, plain and simple. It sorts Texans by skin color and sex, punishes merit, and funnels money to consultants who produce nothing.”

    Huffines said the comptroller’s office handles thousands of contracts and grants involving hundreds of state agencies and thousands of local governments, making the new requirements applicable to a broad range of state-funded agreements.

    “Every contractor and every grantee is on notice. Hire the best, promote the best, and serve every Texan the same, and you will do just fine,” Huffines said. “Push woke DEI with taxpayer money, and we will terminate your agreement on the spot.”

  • Hmmm: “Speaker Burrows Says Texas House to Investigate Truthfulness of Testimony from Travis County DA’s Office.”

    Holly Hansen: In that testimony, there were some questions about the Travis County District Attorney’s Office and other district attorneys’ offices around the state, and a possible relationship with a progressive reform group known as the Wren Collective.

    Did any of that surprise you, or are there additional concerns about what may be happening there?

    Dustin Burrows: There are absolutely additional concerns. I think all Texans should be concerned with what was exposed during that hearing. I mean, there’s evidence that the Wren Collective communicated with Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzalez and his first Assistant District Attorney Christian Hendrickson about prosecutorial policies involving bail, sentencing, and plea guidelines.

    We saw that there was a non-disclosure agreement that was in place. Lots of questions raised. We also know that there’s been a ton of money that has been poured into these races by progressive mega-donors like George Soros. They’re literally spending millions of dollars backing district attorney candidates throughout the state.

    Remember that Wren Collective is a radical leftwing social justice organization that never met a minority criminal it didn’t love, nor a cop it didn’t hate.

  • Unlikely: “70% of the Moroccans who invaded Ceuta claimed to be gay in their asylum requests to the Spanish government.”
  • “Seattle judge decides mass shooter should be released to home detention.”

    A judge has ordered the release of a teenage suspect charged in the deadly mass shooting at the Bite of Seattle festival to home detention on electronic home monitoring, overriding objections from prosecutors who argued he remains a severe threat to community safety.

    The teen suspect faces charges of first-degree assault with a firearm enhancement and second-degree unlawful possession of a firearm. Court documents show the State is seeking to decline juvenile jurisdiction and try him as an adult.

  • “Fort Bend County Tax-Assessor-Collector Arrested on Federal Fraud Charges. Carmen Turner allegedly created fraudulent positions at taxpayer expense.”

    Fort Bend County Tax-Assessor-Collector Carmen Turner and two co-conspirators were arrested Thursday on charges including conspiracy to commit fraud, theft of government funds and benefits, and wire fraud related to a scheme that included fraudulent positions in her office at taxpayers’ expense.

    “If you did not already hate tax collectors enough already, we’re going to give you a few more reasons to do so today,” said Aaron Reitz, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, during a press conference in Houston on Thursday.

    According to the federal indictments, Turner hired Shemerrylyn Regina Fields as a deputy tax clerk but then allegedly tasked Fields with providing full-time care for Turner’s elderly mother. Turner also hired Victor Ewing, the father of her adult child, as a department coordinator — a position Reitz said was “fake.”

    Although Ewing drew a Fort Bend County paycheck, he reportedly lived in Chicago and worked at another full-time job at O’Hare Airport. Reitz said Ewing then sent payments back to Turner in what he characterized as an alleged “kickback” scheme.

    “Carmen Turner has been strutting around Fort Bend County with the title The Honorable for years. Nothing could be more dishonorable—or illegal—than her and her conspirators’ public corruption,” Reitz said. “The people of the Southern District of Texas have my commitment to do everything we can to do justice and make it right. Taxpayers deserve so much better.”

    Jason Hudson, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Houston Division, said that Turner allegedly instructed Fields to lie about her work on Fort Bend County time sheets, and that the fraudulent activity took place from about September 2023 to September 2025.

    I know you’ll be shocked to learn that Turner is a Democrat…

  • Yes, the really want to trans your kids. “Children across Texas were just mailed instructions on how to ‘transition.'” Something called the “Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT)” seems to be behind the mailers, despite their denials.
  • “California Elementary Schools Teach ‘Cisheteropatriarchy’ and ‘Decolonization,’ House Probe Finds.”

    In Berkeley, Calif., elementary schoolers are learning about “cisgenderpatriarchy,” “ableism,” and “decolonization,” a House Education Committee investigation found.

    Representative Tim Walberg commissioned the investigation following an uptick in antisemitic incidents after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks against Israel. While the report, which was shared with National Review, documents instances of antisemitism in all three school districts the committee examined, investigators also found a broader pattern of left-wing bias that shapes how young children are being taught history, reading, geography, economics, and other subjects.

    In some instances teachers and National Education Association union leaders discouraged colleagues from sharing certain controversial lessons “directly with families.” One such lesson aimed to teach Berkeley students about Israel and Palestine. Lesson plans obtained by the committee claimed that “from the river to the sea” — a popular activist slogan that calls for the elimination of the state of Israel — can be “a call for freedom and peace.” The same lesson avoided describing Hamas as a terrorist organization.

    Berkeley’s ethnic studies curriculum offers several examples of how these political themes enter the classroom.

    In fourth-grade ethnic studies, Berkeley Unified School District teachers asked nine-year-olds to define “covert resistance” and “overt resistance.” Teachers also introduced the terms of “colonization,” “decolonization,” and “settler.” With these new definitions in mind, the curriculum explained that history “is often presented from a colonizer’s perspective” and expressed the importance of “decolonizing historical narratives.”

    The district’s fifth-grade ethnic studies curriculum takes a similar approach to civics. A unit titled “defining democracy” sought to “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”

    When teaching about the Founding Fathers, Berkeley’s fourth-grade curriculum aimed to “challenge imperialist/colonial hegemonic beliefs and practices on the ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels.” The term “Founding Fathers,” the lesson says, is “harmful because it does not acknowledge the Indigenous communities who lived here before colonization.”

    The investigation found similar politicization in the School District of Philadelphia. A lesson taught to ninth graders linked capitalism to imperialism and colonialism.

    Social justice corrupts everything it touches.

  • “Shopping app Temu will pay Texas $3 million, store Texans’ personal data on U.S. servers, and submit to independent compliance audits under a new settlement Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Friday.”

    The settlement comes after Paxton sued PDD Holdings, Inc. and WhaleCo Inc., which conducts business as Temu, earlier this year for harvesting the personal information of customers and exposing it to the Chinese Communist Party.

    In the lawsuit, Paxton alleged that the company violated Texas law “by engaging in false pricing schemes, misrepresenting the quality of its goods, and covertly mining the data of Texans.”

    Paxton also called the shopping app “a Trojan horse” that has the ability to bypass security protocols and allow “backdoor access” to a user’s private data, all under the guise of an avenue to buy “affordable great products.”

    Although Temu’s principal offices currently are located in Ireland, Paxton says that the company has maintained significant operational ties to China, which is where it was originally founded.

    Temu has also been accused of selling products that contain harmful chemicals, such as PFAS, posing health risks to consumers.

    Eh. $3 million seems pretty low to me…

  • There’s stupid, there’s turbo-stupid, and then there’s live-streaming yourself trying to kill a cop…with a brick.
  • There’s not a facepalm big enough. “A person claiming responsibility for the breach of Denmark’s Central Register of Persons (CPR) says they gained access through an IT company’s account protected by the password ‘123456.’”
  • Elon Musk invests $1 billion into Skydance. Live look at Hollywood liberals:

  • Comic Creator Matt Howarth, RIP.
  • Interesting interview with Top Gear/Grand Tour presenter Richard Hammond.
  • “Minneapolis restaurant with no prices will close after years of ‘trying to prove’ that socialism works.” Let’s brush this off:

  • I can’t remember whether I featured these mad Brit slow mo lads here or on Futuramen, but here they’re attaching heavy things to a high speed mechanical whip and hurling them at object. Much silly insanity ensues.
  • Speaking of silly hilarity, Kentucky Ballistics tests the power of various calibers to penetrate giant marshmallows…including the British Boys Antitank Rifle.
  • I’ve got a new Lame Excuse Books catalog of science fiction, fantasy and horror coming out next week. Drop me a line if you want to get a copy of it emailed to you.
  • “Man Frustrated By Gas Prices Votes To Start Castrating Kids Again.”
  • “Nation Of France Films Massive Campaign Ad For Republicans.”
  • “French Protesters Demand More Socialism To Fix Problems Caused By Socialism.”
  • “Ilhan Omar Says She Didn’t Know She’d Married Her Brother As They Were Separated At Birth And Hidden From Their Father, Darth Vader.”
  • “God Pulls Back Even With Gavin Newsom In Race To Destroy California.
  • “Trump Criticized For Choosing New Press Secretary Jessica Rabbit.”
  • Shelter dog gets adopted after four years:

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

    PHP Vulnerability: It’s Really, Really Bad

    Posted on October 22, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    A new critical Internet security vulnerability has been announced, and it’s really, really bad.

    The PHP Foundation has revealed two serious vulnerabilities that could impact millions of websites. Security experts warn that failure to quickly patch the flaws could have dire consequences.

    Internet security and web administration teams around the world are scrambling to prevent widespread disaster. On Wednesday, the developers behind the much-used PHP programming language released emergency security updates designed to fix critical flaws that could be exploited to allow attackers to gain dangerous remote control of victim systems.

    The PHP Foundation detailed the two critical vulnerabilities—CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619—which impact “all PHP installations serving web requests” going back to PHP version 5, released in July 2004. However, only PHP 8.2 and newer are still supported and will receive patches, according to the alert. The PHP Foundation noted, though, that some PHP distributions and third-party vendors still produce legacy fixes. The caveat is significant because ubiquitous and foundational web layers like PHP can persist forgotten and un-updated in historic internet infrastructure.

    “There are no complete mitigations, updating is the only safe choice,” the PHP Foundation wrote in its advisories. Security experts warn of the potential dire consequences of overlooking unpatched systems.

    “This is not a drill,” says Lukasz Olejnik, an independent security consultant and visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London. Since its development in the 1990s, PHP has evolved into an essential scripting language for web development and is used across vast swaths of the internet in websites and software. Everything from publishing systems like WordPress and Drupal to e-commerce platforms like Adobe’s Magento are built on PHP.

    You may have noticed that BattleSwarm is built on WordPress.

    Olejnik likens the widespread use of the programming language to critical infrastructure.

    “The impact is enormous,” he says of PHP’s security flaws, adding that millions of systems could be impacted. “Especially if attackers would turn to exploiting these vulnerabilities fast. Worst case is wormable malware affecting big chunks of the internet.”

    The overriding fear for security teams and developers is that malicious hackers could quickly jump upon the vulnerabilities and begin exploiting deployments before they are fixed. Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare reported it was “seeing early attacks emerging” before the PHP Foundation had detailed the vulnerabilities and released fixes. “We expect mass attacks to start within 15 minutes of the release,” security firm Sansec wrote ahead of the fixes, which were released just before 10 am ET on Wednesday.

    “Most of the web runs on PHP and this bug is in a file upload interface that’s like a front door with no lock,” says longtime security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer. “An attacker does not need to know which site they are hitting or even the actual software it runs. They send one crafted upload to any server they can find, and that is the entire attack.”

    This is a huge, huge issue because PHP is everywhere. A vast number of websites use a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), and PHP is in all of them. This is worse than the log4j vulnerability (which was bad enough), since in a pinch you can live without logging for a while. Remove PHP from your web server, and just about everything breaks. In theory, you could still serve up static web pages, but I’m betting most sites have PHP involved in that task as well, and anything serving up dynamic content (database call, stock prices, etc.) on a LAMP setup is going to break.

    What does the actual PHP vulnerability note say? “We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs.”

    That’s really, really, really bad.

    Brian Krebs has a report that covers some of the things already breaking.

    Reuters reports that government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline today after the PHP vulnerabilities were disclosed. Cloudflare said it has already detected some exploitation of the flaw, and that at 3:02 am (UTC) it implemented web application firewall rules to protect websites from attack traffic seeking to exploit the bugs, which could cause a denial of service condition, remote code execution, and data exposure.

    OpenAI, which was involved in the vulnerability research and outreach, said “given the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory.”

    Censys, a company that tracks the technology used by Internet hosts, said a recent scan identified approximately 2.58 million Internet facing hosts and 54.9 million web properties running PHP.

    Security experts at Wiz said every PHP version released in the last decade is affected by at least one of these vulnerabilities [full disclosure: Wiz is an advertiser on this blog].

    “These findings rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history,” reads a blog post published today by a team of researchers at Wiz, which was one of several organizations credited with discovering the vulnerabilities. “The underlying flaws had been present for decades, but demonstrating their exploitability required an exceptionally complex chain of steps, at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve. Frontier AI models substantially reduced that barrier, turning a longstanding flaw into an exploit.”

    Snip.

    The bugs are fixed in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35.

    Folks, this is a bad one. If you run any sort of website, you need to get this one updated ASAP.

    Posted in Crime, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

    Forget LA to SF: California Democrats Can’t Even Build A 2.25 Mile Rail System

    Posted on October 21, 2026 by Lawrence Person

    We’ve long derided California’s never-to-be-built “high speed” train to nowhere, which was going to spend (at last count) $135 billion to (in theory) build a 494 mile rail network connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco. But forget that. Thanks to the magic power of Democrat governance, Los Angeles can’t even build a 2.25 mile rail system for its airport.

    Democrat-run California is the place where delivery never has any relationship to the promise, the cost estimate never comes close to suggesting the actual cost, the scheduled completion date is an open joke, and the failures and misunderstandings descend into allegations so bizarre they seem like a series of Mad Libs answers.

    With the summer Olympics bringing crowds to Los Angeles in 2028, the City of Los Angeles decided to reduce traffic congestion at its famously nightmarish airport, LAX, by at-long-last linking the terminals and off-site rental car facilities with an automated train. The 2.25-mile SkyLink project was approved in 2018 and broke ground in 2019, with a promised opening date of 2023, at a budgeted construction cost of $1.9 billion.

    A rail system shouldn’t cost close to a billion dollars a mile, unless you’re having to tunnel under downtown London or Manhattan. You could have put in a dedicated bus or trolley lane for well under 1/10th of that price. But that wouldn’t have offered nearly as many opportunities for graft.

    A larger dollar figure cited in that approval, totaling just under $5 billion, was supposed to be the cost of construction plus the cost of operating the system, covering the first thirty years of the project.

    Today, the project is hoping to start serving passengers sometime in 2027, and construction costs alone are expected to top $3 billion. The empty trains slowly circle the airport, being tested again after recent structural failures that caused damage and uncertainty.

    To understand everything that comes next, you’ll need to know the abbreviations for the two entities that make up SkyLink’s public-private construction partnership: Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), an agency of the City of Los Angeles, and LAX Express Integrated Solutions (LINXS), a Delaware LLC created in 2018 by the consortium of construction and engineering contractors who are building the project.

    I’m skipping over all the various physical defects (including electric arcing) the system has experienced. Third rail electric systems have only been around since the late 19th century, so you’d think this would be a solved problem by now. But here’s a paragraph that confirms that vaunted efficiency Los Angeles has enjoyed under Karen Bass is still working its magic:

    On 8/13/26, LINXS Constructors was informed by LAWA personnel that a fire alarm control panel was vandalized at 351 World Way (WCTA). It was also reported that a police report had been filed for the incident. LINXS Constructors has made attempts to obtain the police report # from the LAWA personnel who have refused to provide it. In response, LINXS Constructors started its own investigation to see if its equipment (i.e. fire alarm control panels) had been vandalized. LINXS Constructors identified that on 8/12/2026 that someone (suspected to be a LAWA employee) entered LINXS Constructors’ construction site without permission and removed the key cylinder to LINXS’ Fire Command Center on the first floor of the Parking Garage 3.5 (LINXS Constructors’ construction site). LINXS Constructors did not provide any LAWA personnel permission to enter its space and remove LINXS Constructors’ key cylinder from LINXS Constructors’ door, nor permission to enter LINXS Constructors’ space under any circumstances without LINXS Constructors’ knowledge. LAWA personnel have continued to enter LINXS Constructors’ space without LINXS Constructors’ consent after the removal of LINXS Constructors’ key cylinder. LINXS Constructors’ no longer has access to its space and equipment and materials due to LAWA’s trespass and breach of contract.

    This is no way to run even the most basic construction site, much less a railroad.

    Reflecting those themes of suspicion and hostility, a breach of contract lawsuit filed against the city in July by the LINXS consortium of contractors lays out a set of complicated grievances that are unlikely to be resolved in a hurry, producing extraordinary counterclaims from city officials.

    Snip.

    The SkyLink project is part of LAWA’s Landside Access Modernization Program (LAMP) a much larger effort to improve the streets and traffic on the “landside,” rather than the “airside,” of the airport. (So yes: LAWA LAMP.)

    LINXS charges in its lawsuit that the long list of other contractors working on other LAMP projects are pirating electricity from the SkyLink project, improperly entering closed SkyLink construction areas, and performing demolition work on completed elements of the SkyLink system that get in their way.

    Don’t miss that last part: The people who are building the automated train system at LAX allege that other LAWA contractors are destroying their work as they finish it. LINXS depicts their construction project as a fight against the destructive efforts of the people who commissioned their construction project.

    Finally, the LINXS lawsuit gets especially ugly with an explosive claim that LAWA is deliberately trying to prevent the contractors from successfully completing the project, allegedly so the city can dodge political accountability for the delays and avoid paying contractual penalties to the contractors, as a start.

    Conditions from project lenders meant that the delays allegedly caused by LAWA threatened LINXS with financial catastrophe, as an October 8 deadline for project completion presaged a failure that could cause the project’s lenders to call in their loans. The deadline passed, and the lenders granted a reprieve, but a new financial deadline arrives in December.

    But then we get to Paragraph 124 of the complaint, the angry heart of the current court battle. This is where LINXS alleges that LAWA is deliberately making an effort to cause the project to fail so that it can be taken over and given to someone else:

    A whole lot can go wrong on a building project, but active malevolence on the part of the people who contracted the project out is some new level of Project Hell.

    And this is why a project that was supposed to be done in 2023 for less than $2 billion is still far from done and reportedly at least a billion dollars over budget.

    The obvious unspoken assumption here is that LINXS just wasn’t providing enough graft to local officials, so LAWA is going to take the project away from them and give it to local cronies who will kickback more graft into local Democrat pockets…

    Posted in Budget, Democrats, Waste and Fraud | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments