Today’s the 81st anniversary of D-Day. Trump and Musk fight over the “big beautiful bill,” the Dutch government collapses, a whole lot of megacorps decide that “Pride Month” is over, hot Skynet on Skynet action, a fake Titanic, “nose ring theory” and a white Black Panther.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Elon Musk is not a fan of the “big, beautiful bill.”
Elon Musk, the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, on Tuesday dismissed President Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill as a “disgusting abomination.”
“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” he said in a post on X.
“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” he added.
Musk’s comments on Tuesday represent an even harsher reaction to the bill than his previous criticisms. Last month, he said he was “disappointed” by the House passage of the bill because it undermines the work he has done as the head of DOGE.
“The president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday. “It doesn’t change the president’s opinion.”
While the bill aims to cut $1.5 trillion in government spending, it also increases the debt limit by $4 trillion. The U.S. government is more than $36 trillion in debt.
The bill would extend the 2017 tax cuts, introduce new tax cuts such as Trump’s signature “no tax on tips” policy, and add work requirements to Medicaid, among other provisions.
The measure passed 215 to 214 in the House, largely along party lines after Speaker Mike Johnson was able to overcome opposition from members of his caucus who argued the bill should include further spending cuts to offset tax cuts that will add to the country’s deficit.
Musk thoughts mirror my own. They should not have used reconciliation on a bill that doesn’t balance the budget.
Beyond entitlement reform, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget offers users an option in a fix-the-debt-yourself game. Among the options are medical-malpractice reform (saving the U.S. government $40 billion over ten years), allowing private plans to compete with Medicare ($360 billion over ten years), banning state Medicare matching gimmicks ($830 billion over ten years), rescinding Inflation Reduction Act climate tax credits ($780 billion over ten years), and repealing and replacing student-debt cancellation ($320 over ten years). Enact all of those, and that’s another $233 billion per year or so.
The administration of California Governor Gavin Newsom held closed-door talks on trade cooperation with Chinese officials on Monday, ahead of the anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s massacre at Tiananmen Square.
The meeting will take place on the sidelines of the China-California Business Forum, an annual summit hosted by the Chinese consulate general in Los Angeles at the city’s ritzy Biltmore Hotel. That annual gathering gives local and state politicians an opportunity to rub shoulders with their Chinese counterparts.
The Newsom administration’s participation in the meeting comes just ahead of the June 4 anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which is commemorated by Chinese pro-democracy advocates and human rights advocates.
Should we be relieved that Newsom isn’t actually sleeping with any of them?
You know that illegal alien scumbag gangbanger Democrats were all outraged over his getting deported to El Salvador? Well, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being returned to the U.S….to face charges on human trafficking.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, has returned to the United States to face criminal charges for allegedly transporting illegal immigrants within the U.S., the Department of Justice said Friday.
Last month, a federal grand jury in Tennessee indicted Abrego Garcia, who was deported two months ago from Maryland to El Salvador.
Prosecutors say Abrego Garcia was involved in a nearly decade-long conspiracy to transport thousands of illegal immigrants from Texas to other areas around the country. The illegal immigrants, some of whom were members of the MS-13 gang, came from Mexico and Central America.
“The grand jury found that over the past nine years Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday. “They found this was his full-time job. Not a contractor. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. He made over 100 trips, the grand jury found, smuggling people throughout our country.”
While the allegations were not included in the May 21 indictment, Bondi said that Abrego Garcia also solicited nude images from a minor and was linked to the murder of a rival gang member’s mother. Co-conspirators also accused Abrego Garcia of assaulting women whom he transported across the country and claimed he was also involved in trafficking firearms and narcotics.
No wonder he’s a poster child for Democrats…
There’s not an Alanis Morissette joke big enough: “A once-prominent Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired this week for outright fabricating data on numerous academic studies of dishonesty and unethical behavior.”
Francesca Gino was regularly cited as an authority by prominent left-leaning outlets such as National Public Radio and the New York Times. Both outlets now admit that Gino’s research was likely fabricated. Disturbingly, the flaws in her research were exposed not by the allegedly robust university system of peer review, but by a series of posts by science bloggers.
No professor has had tenure revoked at Harvard since the 1940s, when the rules for doing so were formalized, according to the Harvard Crimson. This is the academic nuclear option.
Gino’s first retracted study showed evidence of data fabrication all the way back in 2021, and an investigation into her academic dishonesty lasted for the following two years.
“Paxton Smokes Cornyn 50-28 Percent in Latest 2026 GOP Primary Poll.” Only 600 Republican primary voters, which is on the small side for a poll sample.
Is wokeness dying? A whole lot of Fortune 500 companies have decided that they can now sit “Pride Month” out, including IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Disney, Target, Starbucks, BMW, Bank of America, and even Google. I think most Americans were willing to let adult “LGBs” go off and do their own thing, but every single letter they’ve added to that acronym since (especially the “T”) has marked them as enemies of the people.
Despite the power-sharing cabal ruling the Texas House, a lot of conservative priorities did get get passed and sent to Abbott’s desk. Here’s a roundup.
The Texas Senate succeeded in pushing a majority of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s legislative priorities through both chambers during the regular legislative session. Patrick released a list of 40 pieces of priority legislation in the first three months of the year, covering a variety of issues.
Here is the status of the Senate priority bills in the 89th Legislative Session:
Senate Bill 1 – Senate’s Budget for Texas: Passed both chambers.
Senate Bill 2 – Providing School Choice: Signed into law.
Senate Bill 3 – Banning THC in Texas: Sent to Gov. Greg Abbott.
Senate Bill 4 – Increasing the Homestead Exemption to $140,000 ($150,000 for Seniors): Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 5 – Combatting Dementia and Alzheimer’s – Establishing DPRIT (Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas): Signed into law.
Senate Bill 6 – Increasing Texas’ Electric Grid Reliability: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 7 – Increasing Investments in Texas’ Water Supply: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 8 – Requiring Local Law Enforcement to Assist the Federal Government’s Deportation Efforts: Passed both chambers.
Senate Bill 9 – Reforming Bail – Keeping Violent Criminals Off Our Streets: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 10 – Placing the Ten Commandments in School: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 11 – Protecting the Freedom to Pray in School: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 12 – Establishing a Parental Bill of Rights in Public Education: Passed both chambers.
Senate Bill 13 – Guarding Against Inappropriate Books in Public Schools: Passed both chambers.
Senate Bill 14 – Texas DOGE – Improving Government Efficiency: Signed into law.
Senate Bill 15 – Removing Barriers to Housing Affordability: Passed both chambers.
Senate Bill 16 – Stopping Non-Citizens from Voting: Left in House Calendars Committee.
Senate Bill 17 – Stopping Foreign Adversary Land Grabs: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 18 – Stopping Drag Time Story Hour: Left on House General State Calendar.
Senate Bill 19 – Stopping Taxpayer Dollars for Lobbyists: Left in the House State Affairs Committee.
Senate Bill 20 – Stopping AI-Generated Child Pornography: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 21 – Establishing the Texas Bitcoin Reserve: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 22 – Establishing Texas as America’s Film Capital: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 23 – Removing the Cap on the Rainy Day Fund to Secure Texas’ Long-term Financial Future: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 24 – Educating Texas Students on the Horrors of Communism: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 25 – Making Texas Healthy Again: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 26 – Increasing Teacher Pay: Left in the House Public Education Committee.
Senate Bill 27 – Establishing a Teacher Bill of Rights: Passed both chambers.
Senate Bill 28 – Banning Lottery Couriers: Left in House Licensing and Administrative Committee.
Senate Bill 29 – Texas: Open for Business: Signed into law.
Senate Bill 30 – Curbing Nuclear Verdicts: Conference committee appointed.
Senate Bill 31 – Life of the Mother Act: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 32 – Business Tax Relief: Left in the House Ways and Means Committee.
Senate Bill 33 – Stopping Taxpayer-Funded Abortion Travel: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 34 – Wildfire Response: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 35 – Competing for Quality Roads: Left on House General State Calendar.
Senate Bill 36 – Establishing a Homeland Security Division within [the Department of Public Safety]: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 37 – Reforming Faculty Senates: Passed both chambers.
Senate Bill 38 – Stopping Squatters: Sent to Abbott.
Senate Bill 39 – Protecting Texas Trucking: Left in the House Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Committee.
Senate Bill 40 – Stopping Taxpayer-Funded Bail: Sent to Abbott.
Not every conservative priority passed, and I don’t agree with every bill (much less every part of every bill), but a lot of progress was made this legislative session. Dan Patrick’s senate seems much better at delivering conservative results than David Dewhurst’s senate ever was.
Columbia U finally gets to the “find out” stage: “Columbia University Failed to Meet Accreditation Standards, Department of Education Finds.”
Columbia University failed to meet accreditation standards due to its inability to uphold civil rights law and punish harassment against Jewish students, the Department of Education announced Wednesday.
Office of Civil Rights (OCR) officials have notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the body that sets Columbia’s accreditation standards, that the university is “in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws and therefore fails to meet standards.” Administrators’ unwillingness to address months of anti-Israel activism on Columbia’s campus created an unsafe environment for Jewish students, the department added, putting the university in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“The Dutch government collapsed on Tuesday after the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders pulled out of the coalition over the government’s asylum policy. Wilders had been adamant leading up to the collapse that without strict restrictions on immigration, his party would leave the coalition government. Wilders made good on those threats Tuesday.” Europe’s political elites evidently love unassimilated Muslim immigration more than they love life itself.
Marcos Lopez, the Democratic sheriff of Osceola County, Florida decided that, instead of busting an illegal gambling operations, it was a lot more profitable to run it.
Someone asked me why UK Labour PM Keir Starmer was suddenly sounding like an uberhawk, talking about expanding UK’s nuclear submarine building program, etc. Actually, this is nothing particularly new, as he made similar points in February, and even last year. But I think the release of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review is driving much of the current chatter. A lot of it just the usual high-minded blather and buzzwords you find in any such doc, but there’s some meat here. Such as this “list of technologies redefining warfare” on page 27:
Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data science, improving the quality and speed of decision-making, the resilience of
digital networks, and operational effectiveness. Forecasts of when Artificial General Intelligence (Where AI matches or surpasses humans’ ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a range of situations unaided) will occur are uncertain but shortening, with profound implications for Defence.
Robotics and autonomy, with armed forces increasingly using uncrewed and autonomous capabilities to generate mass and lethality.
Enhanced precision weapons that mean targets can be struck with greater accuracy from ever
greater ranges.
Directed energy weapons, such as the UK’s DragonFire, which have the potential to reduce collateral damage and reliance on expensive ammunition.
Hypersonic missiles, which, travelling at over five times the speed of sound, may offer greater range and greater ability to evade defences.
Space-based capabilities that enable all aspects of modern operations. States are rapidly developing ways to disrupt military and civilian assets in and from space.
Quantum. Advances in quantum computing offer the potential to break encryption, making secure communications much more difficult. Quantum technologies have the
potential to reduce dependence on satellite-based GPS, which may be vulnerable to interference.
Cyber threats that will become harder to mitigate as technology evolves, with AI, quantum technology, and the increasing dependence on satellite communications likely driving the most disruptive changes to the cyber threat landscape.
Engineering biology that creates the potential to enhance the capacity of the armed forces through advances in medicine, healthcare, and wellbeing, possibilities for new energetic and explosive materials, as well as avenues for enormous harm in the shape of new pathogens and other weapons of mass destruction.
A nice list of science fiction story ideas, some even with near-term defense applications.
They’re also buying more subs and planes…
Speaking of future warfare, Lockheed Martin has launched AI “fight club” to test AIs against each other. This is a god idea, if they have their little Forbin Projects properly sandboxed, and if they remember that the map is not the territory. There are always radical surprises in warfare… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Ono, who curiously was the only finalist advanced by the search committee for the job, came with their unanimous recommendation on May 4 and was unanimously approved by the university’s Board of Trustees on May 27. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has pledged that Florida is “where woke goes to die,” remained oddly reticent about Ono—stating first that he trusted the process, and later that the governors (15 of the 17 governors were appointed by DeSantis), should follow their consciences in deciding Ono’s fate.
Other Florida conservatives, including Senator Rick Scott and Congressmen Greg Steube, Byron Donalds, and Jimmy Patronis, denounced the appointment and outright called for a negative vote.
Ono’s rejection by the Florida Board of Governors is an unprecedented, but legally and procedurally correct, use of its powers. Ono’s demise followed a polite but charged meeting in Orlando on the campus of Central Florida University. Public comments included scathing denunciations and trenchant questions about his candidacy based on his well-documented record for supporting DEI, critical race theory, and radical gender ideology, among other leftist shibboleths.
DeSantis should have done more to nip this candidacy in the bud.
The New Harbor Bridge in Corpus Christi is about to open after years of delay. It has numerous innovative features, and I’m including it here for the blog’s bridge and infrastructure enthusiasts (you know who you are).
Speaking of which: “‘Andor’ Creator Says Disney Spent ‘$650 Million for 24 Episodes’ and ‘We Fought Hard’ for Money After Being Told in Season 2: ‘Streaming Is Dead. We Don’t Have the Money We Had Before.’”
Just two days after the Texas Legislature adjourned without passing legislation to end in-state tuition for illegal aliens, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Texas.
Now, the state has settled, ending the discounted tuition for illegals for now.
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the lawsuit challenges longstanding provisions of the Texas Education Code that allow certain illegal aliens to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities—rates that are significantly lower than those charged to U.S. citizens from other states.
“Federal law prohibits illegal aliens from getting in-state tuition benefits that are denied to out-of-state U.S. citizens,” the DOJ complaint reads. “There are no exceptions. Yet the State of Texas has ignored this law for years.”
The lawsuit cited a federal statute that bars states from offering postsecondary education benefits based on residency to illegal aliens unless the same benefit is available to all U.S. citizens regardless of residency. The DOJ argued Texas law is in direct violation of that statute and therefore preempted under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
Since 2001, Texas has allowed illegal alien students to qualify for in-state tuition if they attended Texas high schools and resided in the state for a certain period. At the time, the policy received bipartisan support and was signed into law by then-Gov. Rick Perry.
During his 2012 presidential campaign, Perry defended the law and infamously called critics of the policy “heartless” during a nationally televised debate.
It was a stupid idea then. Government benefits should be reserved for American citizens. Giving them to illegal aliens is not only morally wrong, it encourages other aliens to break the law by coming here illegally.
Senate Bill 1798 by State Sen. Mayes Middleton would have repealed that provision and barred state-funded financial aid from going to illegal aliens. Despite being placed on the Senate intent calendar, the bill was never brought up for a vote.
Curious.
Now, with the legislative session over and the bill dead, the Trump administration stepped in to accomplish what the Legislature didn’t.
The DOJ asked the court to declare the Texas provisions unconstitutional and to permanently block the state from enforcing them.
Hours after the lawsuit was announced, a settlement was announced, with the state agreeing not to offer discounted tuition to illegal aliens.
“In-state tuition for illegal immigrants in Texas has ended. Texas is permanently enjoined from providing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants,” wrote Gov. Greg Abbott in a social media post.
Funny how you can get things done when Republicans control both the state and national executive branches.
Slowly but surely, common sense is returning to government, and official government preferences for illegal aliens are being stripped away.
Remember Operation Choke Point, the Obama-era policy (renewed by Biden) to “unbank” disfavored people and industries (like firearms) despite the lack of any law to do so? Citibank just announced that they’re ending their own anti-gun policy.
Financial services company Citi is walking back its political de-banking policy and its requirement for retail clients to restrict gun sales, making it the latest large corporation to distance itself from progressive corporate governance.
Citi announced the changes Tuesday after examining its corporate policies in light of shifts to the regulatory climate and President Trump’s executive orders.
“We will update our employee Code of Conduct and our customer-facing Global Financial Access Policy to clearly state that we do not discriminate on the basis of political affiliation in the same way we are clear that we do not discriminate on the basis of other traits such as race and religion,” the banking company said in a statement.
“We also will no longer have a specific policy as it relates to firearms. Our U.S. Commercial Firearms Policy was implemented in 2018 and pertained to sale of firearms by our retail clients and partners. The policy was intended to promote the adoption of best sales practices as prudent risk management and didn’t address the manufacturing of firearms.”
So Citi will no longer discriminate against businesses that operate to enable a protected constitutional right. Imagine that.
Citi’s rescinded policies are both part of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement in corporate America that seeks to use corporations as vehicles for progressive goals. The ESG and diversity, equity, and inclusion movements in corporate America have been in retreat since Trump returned to office and signed executive orders to aggressively combat DEI and illegal racial discrimination. Walmart, McDonald’s, Target, Verizon, Meta, and numerous other corporations have scaled back DEI commitments since Trump resoundingly won the 2024 presidential election.
“Scaling back” isn’t enough. ESG is illegal, racist poison that destroys shareholder value. ESG and DEI need to be completely purged from corporate America. Actually, all America, but publicly-held companies have a fiduciary duty to do so.
Conservatives have raised the alarm about financial companies “de-banking” right-wing clients and denying them access to services because of political orientation. The practice has mostly impacted right-wing extremists—
[[citation needed]] Here NRO is making an assertion unsupported by the evidence, unless they have access to a secret list of the unbanked that we don’t. Also, given their own case of TDS, I don’t trust today’s NRO to define “right-wing extremists.” And remember that the late David Horowitz was among Operation Choke Points unbanking targets.
—but it has spilled out into industries disfavored by the left and other conservative institutions.
“Spilled out into”? Operation Choke Point targeted Obama’s enemies from the git-go.
Republican lawmakers have also raised the alarm about cases of de-banking involving gun dealerships and religiously affiliated institutions.
The cryptocurrency industry has been particularly critical of what crypto proponents believed to be targeted and weaponized de-banking practices. But the crypto industry has also been associated with fraud, money laundering, and other illicit schemes involving criminal networks that banks look to clamp down on.
President Donald Trump called out Bank of America and JP Morgan for de-banking in January at the World Economic Forum, reigniting the debate about de-banking at the start of his second term. Both financial titans disputed Trump’s allegations and said they were proud to serve clients of all political affiliations.
In March, the Trump organization sued Capital One for alleged de-banking four years ago because of their political views, an allegation the company disputed.
Denying basic services to Americans based on their political views is deeply un-american. The idea needs to be thrown on the ash heap of history along with the rest of the ESG, DEI and social justice garbage.
Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) says it has managed to strike the Crimea bridge with underwater explosives following an operation lasting “several months”.
The SBU said its agents had “mined the supports” of the bridge with 1,100kg of explosives which “severely damaged” the bottom level of the supports.
The “first explosive device” was activated early Tuesday morning “without any civilian casualties”, the SBU added. The information shared by the SBU could not be immediately verified.
Russian media initially said the bridge was briefly closed to traffic but that it had reopened by 10:00 local time (08:00 GMT).
However, later in the day, local authorities warned the bridge was closed again.
Unconfirmed reports on social media said more explosions had occurred around the structure.
The official Telegram channel sharing operational updates about the bridge said: “We ask those on the bridge and in the inspection zone to remain calm and follow the instructions of the transport security officers.”
Russia has not yet commented on Tuesday morning’s attack but Russian military bloggers speculated that an underwater drone, rather than explosive, had hit a protective barrier.
The SBU said its director, Lieutenant General Vasyl Malyuk, personally supervised the operation and coordinated its planning.
In a Telegram post, it quoted Malyuk as saying Ukraine had hit the Crimea bridge in 2022 and 2023 and was therefore “continuing this tradition under water.”
Coverage of the 2022 strike can be found here, and the 2023 strike was covered here.
“No illegal Russian facilities have a place on the territory of our state,” Malyuk said.
“Therefore, the Crimean Bridge is an absolutely legitimate target, especially considering that the enemy used it as a logistical artery to supply its troops.”
Suchomimus has footage:
“Ukraine reports this one took several months. During that period of time SBU agents of Ukraine place mines along the supports of the Crimean bridge. Today the device was detonated. The underwater supports are reported as being severely damaged at the bottom level.”
“The supports being structurally compromised and destroyed, as seems to be the case here, means that the bridge is, to use a technical term, ‘knackered.'”
“The bridge is still standing. It has not been downed.” But it has been structurally weakened.
Current reports suggest that it was the already-weakened railway span that was hit.
The mines may have been planted under the guise of carrying out maintenance work on the bridge.
“From the sounds of it, the mines were actually buried to reach these supporting poles.”
The speed with which the detonation video was released suggests Ukraine has access to Russia’s video surveillance system.
It’s been a big week for Ukrainian special operations. Some members of Russian counterintelligence must be jumping out of their skins about now…
Six Frio County officials and campaign workers were indicted on felony vote harvesting and evidence tampering charges after a year-long investigation into paid ballot collection targeting elderly voters.
“Good afternoon. This is what I’ll be charging for the election: 2,100 each.”
Four Frio County candidates received this identical text message from Cheryl Denise Castillo on February 27, 2023.
“I want 1000 up front and then you will have 2 months to pay me the rest of the 1000,” she added. “This is the lowest I could go … and I will take turns with y’all for gas and stamps.”
Frio County Sheriff Peter Salinas (D) received one such message.
He later called her in December while speaking with investigators, where she again offered her services on the spot.
As a professional vote harvester, Castillo contacted local Frio Democrat candidates and offered her services to collect votes and help them win their races.
And there’s The D Word. In the previous story, you had to do a little digging to discover that Democrats were involved. I’m glad this one is more explicit.
Vote harvesting is a third-degree felony that can result in prison sentences of up to ten years and fines of up to $10,000.
Castillo will not face any such charges, as she died in October of last year.
Six others in Frio County, however, received grand jury indictments on May 1, including County Judge Rochelle Camacho (D), her sister Adriann Ramirez (Pearsall ISD trustee), city council members Ramiro Trevino and Racheal Garza, former elections administrator Carlos Segura, and campaign worker Rosa Rodriguez. All bonded out after arraignment.
“This is voter suppression 101,” responded Gabriel Rosales, Texas director for the League of United Latin American Citizens. “There’s no vote harvesting going on. There’s nobody creating these ballots. That’s a lie.”
According to search warrant applications from investigator Sgt. Donald Smith, Castillo and others collected, advised, and sometimes mishandled ballots, often targeting elderly or ineligible voters.
Yep, that’s the Democrat Vote Harvesting MO: Getting votes from illegal aliens and preying on the elderly.
The case began after Mary Moore, who lost to Camacho in 2022, reported a tip about paid ballot collection. Moore and others have a history of political disputes in Frio County.
In 2015, the former Frio County judge, city manager, county attorney, and local deputy targeted Moore by improperly accessing her criminal record. The four abruptly resigned and made plea bargains.
Moore suspected the four targeted her for attempting to recall former Mayor Davina Trevino-Rodriguez and her uncle, City Councilman Roy Trevino.
Both names appear on a growing Frio County suspect list with at least twelve others.
According to search warrants, investigators seized the cell phones of several others they believe either gave or received money for vote harvesting:
Cheryl Denise Castillo, a primary vote harvester. Castillo died in October 2024, but allegedly still received texts requesting her services while under investigation.
Maria del Carmen Vela, another primary ballot harvester. According to records, she admitted to helping her brother Joe.
Joe Vela, Frio County commissioner – Precinct 1. He allegedly paid his sister Maria to help him win the 2024 Democrat primary and runoff.
Louisa Martinez, a Pearsall ISD candidate who lost her race in 2023. According to records, Martinez paid Vela in Dr. Pepper, cigarettes, and gas for ballots.
Raul Carrizales III, Frio County commissioner – Precinct 3. Castillo received $3,000 to secure votes for Carrizales, despite Castillo saying she was under investigation.
Mari Benavides, Pearsall ISD board member and secretary, allegedly paid Castillo $2,100 for vote harvesting in 2023 for the school board election. Reports show that she also offered to help Castillo with the vote harvesting process.
Davina Trevino Rodriguez, a former Pearsall city mayor and niece of indicted Pearsall City Council Member Ramiro Trevino, allegedly paid Castillo to secure ballots on her behalf in 2023. Castillo reportedly texted her and three others to offer her vote harvesting services.
None have yet received indictments or arrests.
The records show a detailed text and call history between the competing vote harvesters and their respective candidate clients.
A woman working for Martinez allegedly told investigators that the team knew the election would be tough to win and admitted to providing Vela with sodas, cigarettes, and gas in exchange for collecting ballots on Martinez’s behalf.
Some will point out that these are merely small time Democrat vote hustlers working their hustle on small time local elections in a small Texas county. To which I reply: Exactly. Despite the relatively small stakes of a local ISD election, they were still willing to commit felony vote fraud. In light of that, do you really think Democratic vote hustlers would hesitate to do the same in higher-stakes, big money races?
Remember Trump’s ominous warnings about what would happen if Putin wouldn’t play ball? Shortly after Trump and other NATO allies reportedly lifted long-range strike restrictions on supplied weapons, Ukraine carried out a massive drone attack against multiple Russian airbases that reportedly took out 40 Russian aircraft, most of which were bombers.
Ukraine’s secret service (SBU) has claimed responsibility for a major drone strike on multiple Russian airfields overnight, saying it has damaged or destroyed more than 40 military aircraft used to bomb Ukrainian cities.
The SBU said “Operation Spiderweb” — described as one of the largest and most ambitious of the war — specifically targeted long-range bombers believed to be responsible for regular missile strikes on civilian areas.
The aircraft hit reportedly includes the A-50 radar surveillance plane, as well as Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers — key to Russia’s air assault operations.
The A-50 is Russia’s answer to AWACS, and taking out this one is huge, as it was reportedly the last one Russia had flying.
Ukrainian officials claim the Russian military has suffered damage worth more than $2 billion (£1.4 billion) as a result of the strikes. “Russian airfields are burning,” they said.
It follows earlier Ukrainian statements that their drones had struck Belaya airbase in Irkutsk, deep inside Siberia, and Olenya airbase near Murmansk in the north-west. Footage released by the SBU appeared to show plumes of smoke and explosions around parked aircraft.
Suchomimus has a video up on the strike:
“40 Russian aircraft, mainly bombers, have been destroyed in one fell swoop.”
“I’m going to say this is the biggest and best strike of the war, maybe one of the biggest and best, Maybe one of the biggest and best military operations of all time.”
40 is a preliminary number and may go up.
“It’s mainly bombers, but also some transporters hit.”
It targeted “Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, which Russia uses to carry out long range missile attacks hitting Ukrainian cities constantly.”
“Ukrainian FPV drones were hidden in false cargo containers launched near the Russian airfields, and pretty much swarm them, and caught Russia with its keks down.” Keks are northern UK slang for pants.
“So Ukraine somehow managed to get UAVs into cargo containers on lorries, transported them near the Russian air bases, and launched them, on mass, to swarm the bases before the bombers could take off.”
They hit Olenya base in “Russia’s north near Finland, over 1,700km to the border with Ukraine.”
They also hit a Russian submarine base in Severomorsk, Murmansk Oblast, in the same general area.
“The 222M [is] a big one. Russia has just 56 in service, and the type is not under production anymore. It’s also possible that not all of these 56 are airworthy. We don’t have total numbers yet, but we have to assume, since bases operating these are hit, the significant number of the 222 M fleet is now gone.”
Tu-95: “47 of these were in service, and again, it isn’t under production anymore, so they can’t be replaced, and we saw some burning, so a big chunk of these are, again, gone.”
Tu-160 (AKA Russia’s B1): “10 of these are in service, but 40 on order so these are still under production, and possibly can be replaced. But still, the loss of these has to sting.” Wikipedia has a higher number of 32 production planes, though that number is outsourced. Supposedly four were manufactured in 2023, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the actual number was zero due lack of advanced avionics parts.
“Russia’s going to struggle to recover from this, losing 40 plus aircraft in one day, including many that can’t be replaced.”
The cost-benefit ratio of Vald’s Big Adventure continues to shift heavily against Russia. In addition to having Finland and Sweden join NATO and having up to one million dead, Russia has now lost almost half it’s operational strategic bomber fleet.
This guy is pushing Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson “Abundance Agenda,” which aims to offer an alternative to the Democratic Party’s current downer social justice agenda. I’m not going to cover that much, since I don’t think the “Abundance Agenda” has a snowball’s chance in hell of being adopted by the Party’s current ideological core. But I am posting this for his (admittedly incomplete) critique of how Democrats grievously harmed the very people they’re claiming to be working for by destroying the quality of life in the cities they run.
“Democrats, plain and simple, need to change not only to win elections, but also to help the people they claim to support.”
“Working and middle-class American families are leaving places like California, New York and Illinois by the hundreds of thousands, often relocating to conservative regions.” Just like I talked about earlier this week.
“In the words of progressive journalist Ezra Klein: ‘You cannot claim to be the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live.'” Sure you can! You just need to deploy the time-honored Democratic Party rhetorical device known as “lying your ass off.”
“Donald Trump partly won the 2024 election due to scarcity in the most essential aspects of people’s lives: affordable health care [What, ObamaCare didn’t make health care affordable? I’m shocked… -LP], energy, food, and most importantly housing.”
“For much of America, housing is simply far too expensive. In American cities, especially the liberal progressive ones, there’s an artificial scarcity of housing, and little to none of the available housing is affordable.”
“In 1970 Los Angeles, homes were 2.5 times the median family income, according to Redfin. But in 2022, LA house prices reached over nine times that of median family incomes, requiring families to earn over $220,000 to afford a home.”
“Home ownership is increasingly out of reach for the average worker, and high housing costs have led to financial instability for far too many Americans.”
“Housing supply is partly constrained by zoning restrictions…When more and more individuals and families compete for a near fixed supply of housing stock, prices typically rise making cities unaffordable for existing residents.” You mean like, say, importing millions of illegal aliens to compete with American citizens for limited housing stock?
“Many of America’s most prosperous cities, from New York and Boston to Seattle and San Francisco, heavily restrict the construction of new housing, especially the taller, denser buildings which could house more people, but that’s not the case in all of them.”
“Houston, Texas for example, has some of the most affordable housing and lowest homelessness rates in the country, despite its metro region holding over 7 million residents. This is in part because Houston has essentially no zoning. As a result, because it is extremely easy to build apartments and homes in much of the city, market forces can provide new housing at a variety of price points.”
“In liberal cities attempts, at building housing and infrastructure are often so expensive and inefficient that very little is actually built for low-income Americans. Take San Francisco, for example. The city’s numerous requirements for using public money add millions of dollars to the cost of construction, causing the typical publicly subsidized apartment to take six years to complete with a price tag of 600K per unit.” So affordable!
“San Francisco requires separate reviews from the city’s arts commission and Office of Disability, mandates electricity come from a city-owned utility company, and demands preferential treatment to small local contractors, meaning builders are discouraged from working with contractors who operate at scale.”
“Individually each requirement may seem well-meaning and progressive, but together they cause delays increase costs and ultimately limit the construction of housing for the poor, which clearly is not a progressive outcome.”
“Obstacles aren’t restricted to liberal cities like San Francisco these days building anything in America often requires jumping through a multitude of veto points, allowing interest groups, organizations and hyper local concerns to stop critical projects in their tracks.” Oh, that’s very “progressive” and by design, because every obstacle, every bureaucratic touch-point, provides opportunities for rent- and graft-seeking opportunities to grease the palms of progressives. Look at Austin’s “Reimagining Public Safety” and how just about every recommendation amounts to “take money away from the police and give it to us. This death by a thousand cuts doesn’t deserve the assumption of “good intentions.” It’s a racket that rakes off graft for the hard left.
At this point the author wanders off into more “good intentions, bad outcomes” examples, like environmentalism etc., but non-lefties no longer assume good intentions on the part of the Democratic Party.
Things he fails to mention: How high crime in blue cities with Soros-back prosecutors ruin the quality of life for poor and middle class Americans, and (again) how the huge influx of illegal aliens raises housing prices and sucks up resources that used to benefit American citizens.
Toward the end he states “Democratic doctrine often focuses so much on redistribution rather than growing the pie as a whole,” sounding rather like Jack Kemp or Newt Gingrich in 1994. And I’m pretty sure Democrats at the time either ignored them or called them Nazis.
But the baseline truth is that the ideological core of the Democratic Party wants nothing to do with your white boy “abundance agenda” because it directly conflicts with their primary goals of increasing their own abundance of wealth and power, taking full control of the Democratic Party and using it to destroy Americas existing structures to rebuild them into their imaginary socialist utopia.
You can’t make someone see the advantages of your “abundance agenda” if their entire likelihoods are predicated on not seeing it.
This week brought not one, but gully washers to the Austin area, so now I’m fighting a war against a zillion millipedes climbing the walls to invade every nook and crevice of my home, so I’ve been spraying a lot of pesticide around windows. A Supreme Court win for Trump, lots of budget wrangles, a look at the burgeoning Democrat Party civil war, antifa finally gets investigated, and more Harvard-bashing from the Babylon Bee.
The Supreme Court on Friday sided with the Trump administration – allowing them to revoke temporary legal status granted to over 500,000 immigrants by the Biden administration.
In a 7-2 vote, the court granted an emergency application filed by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that ends the Biden program which granted 532,000 people from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua permission to temporarily live and work in the United States.
This Part 1 report will focus on the George Soros-funded NEO Philanthropy which is funding and orchestrating a massive, nationwide illegal immigration scheme through NEO’s the Four Freedoms Fund.
In the 2024 election, NEO Philanthropy’s Four Freedom Fund sought to raise $5 million to help illegal immigrants stay in the country in the event of a victory by Donald Trump.
A Capital Research report shows NEO Philanthropy and its advocacy sibling received $21 million from the Soros Network to support “advocacy on Latinx rights and empowerment,” change policy in North Carolina, register voters and fund get-out-the-vote efforts among “historically disenfranchised voters” (read: likely Democrats), and boost the Movement for Black Lives.
The Four Freedoms Fund is a donor collaborative of NEO Philanthropy. The Fund primarily focuses on pushing left-of-center immigration policies, including “legalization of undocumented immigrants” through a path to citizenship and comprehensive immigration reform legislation. The Fund is critical of what it calls “anti-immigrant ordinances” created by conservative legislators, including deportations by U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE).
NEO Philanthropy (formerly Public Interest Projects) is a New York-based nonprofit that serves as a fiscal clearinghouse for left-of-center causes. The group serves as a vehicle for left-of-center foundations to pool resources, hosts donor-advised funds, and sponsors various advocacy projects.
The organization is the fiscal sponsor of left-of-center entities, including the Funders Committee on Civic Participation, a voter mobilization group. Disbursing grant money remains one of NEO’s primary functions; NEO Philanthropy gave close to 60 percent of its total expenditures as grants.
Inside Philanthropy described NEO as “an intermediary that doesn’t have its own resources for grantmaking.” The group receives funding from major left-of-center donors institutions including the Atlantic Philanthropies, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gill Foundation, the Pew Trusts and the Carnegie Corporation, among others. The organization and similar left-of-center groups that engage in “nonpartisan” voter registration have received criticism for appearing to favor the registration of voters exceptionally likely to vote for Democrat candidates.
According to a 2016 report, an Obama administration appointee managed a fund that George Soros used to bankroll election-related activities likely increasing the number of “voters of color” and “improving odds” of electing preferred candidates.
Karen Narasaki, a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, managed the Soros-backed NEO-linked Shelby Response Fund. Narasaki worked as a corporate attorney at Russia Collusion hoax conspirator Perkins Coie in Seattle.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis slammed Congressional Republicans on Tuesday over their lack of action on cutting the government waste and abuse identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Back in March, Congress passed the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025, which maintained funding for USAID at the FY 2024 level, effectively extending existing funding for the purportedly “rogue agency” through September 30, 2025.
The “Big Beautiful Bill,” which narrowly passed in the House of Representatives last week, reportedly includes $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, including the largest-ever welfare reform.
But because it is a reconciliation bill, Senate rules limit the cuts to “mandatory” spending only, such as Medicaid and Food Stamps, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller explained on X. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory, so they are not addressed in the Big Beautiful Bill.
Many conservatives have expressed disappointment that Republicans have failed to codify any meaningful cuts in wasteful discretionary spending, as identified by DOGE, in separate bills. Meanwhile, the director of the National Economic Council promised last week that “way more spending cuts” are coming later this year.
In a post on X, DeSantis put the heat on Republicans to do just that, pointing out that DOGE Chief Elon Musk “took massive incoming,” which included “attacks on his companies” and “personal smears” while leading the DOGE effort. “He became public enemy #1 of legacy media around the world,” DeSantis wrote. “To see Republicans in Congress cast aside any meaningful spending reductions (and, in fact, fully fund things like USAID) is demoralizing and represents a betrayal of the voters who elected them,” the governor added.
“House Republicans plan to tee up its first Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut bill next week targeting foreign aid, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) revealed on Wednesday.” Call me thick, but I just don’t see how Republicans can beat a Democratic filibuster without reconciliation, and I don’t think they can use that for this bill.
Hispanic moderates increasingly resemble white moderates politically. They are voting their ideology and political views not their group identity. This is further illustrated by examining Hispanic moderates’ more specific political views.
1. Hispanic moderates think the Democrats have moved too far left. In a 2024 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot and Blueprint, three in five Hispanic moderates agreed the Democratic Party had moved too far left on economic issues and about the same felt they’d moved too far left on “cultural and social issues.”
2. Hispanic moderates are hawkish on illegal immigration. In the same survey, more of these voters thought “America needs to close its borders to outsiders and reduce all levels of immigration” than believed “people around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country.” Most Hispanic moderates endorsed a combination of border security and more legal immigration.
Also in that survey, net support (support minus oppose) among Hispanic moderates for a proposal to “use existing presidential powers to stop illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border” was 59 points (63 percent to 4 percent). Similarly, Hispanic moderates supported by 36 points restricting “the ability of migrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.” And they backed deputizing “the National Guard and local law enforcement to assist with rapidly removing gang members and criminals living illegally in the United States” by 34 points.
3. Hispanic moderates are tough on crime and supportive of law enforcement. Hispanic moderates supported by 53 points a proposal to “increase funding for police and strengthen criminal penalties for assaulting cops.” These voters even supported by 17 points a draconian proposal to “change federal law so that drug traffickers can receive the death penalty.”
4. Hispanic moderates are opposed to Democrats’ stance on transgender issues. In a 2023 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot, voters were offered the following three choices:
States should protect all transgender youth by providing access to puberty blockers and transition surgeries if desired, and allowing them to participate fully in all activities and sports as the gender of their choice;
States should protect the rights of transgender adults to live as they want but implement stronger regulations on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors; or
States should ban all gender transition treatments for minors and stop discussion of gender ideology in all public schools.
The first position here, emphasizing availability of medical treatments for trans-identifying children (euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming” care) and sports participation dictated by gender self-identification, is unquestionably the default position of the Democratic Party. Indeed, to dissent in any way from this position in Democratic circles is still enough to earn one the sobriquet of “hateful bigot”—or worse. Yet less than a fifth of Hispanic moderates (19 percent) endorse this position. Nearly twice as many of these voters endorse the strictest position: that medical treatments for transgender children should simply be banned, as should discussion of gender ideology in public schools. And 45 percent favor the second position, advocating stronger regulation on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors. Together, the latter two positions make it four-to-one among Hispanic moderates against the Democratic position.
5. Hispanic moderates want cheap, reliable energy not a renewables revolution. Cost and reliability is what Hispanic moderates really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey for AEI’s Center for Technology, Science and Energy, 49 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 25 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Together that’s 74 percent of Hispanic moderates prioritizing the cost or reliability of energy. In contrast, just 21 percent thought the effect on climate of their energy consumption was most important. (Another 4 percent selected the effect on U.S. energy security).
Unsurprisingly given this pattern, it turns out that Hispanic moderates just don’t care very much about the climate change issue. In the survey, voters were asked to assess their priorities for the government to address in the coming year. Among 18 options, climate change ranked 14th, beating out only global trade, drug addiction, racial issues, and the problems of poor people.
In terms of general energy strategy, when presented with a choice among three options—a rapid green energy transition, an “all of the above” energy policy, and emphasizing fossil fuels—Hispanic moderates strongly prefer an “all of the above” approach to energy policy including oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear. Only a fifth support a rapid transition to renewables—actually less than support flat-out stopping the renewables push. Hispanic moderates’ preference for an “all of the above” energy strategy is reinforced by their answers to a binary question asking if they preferred using a mix of energy sources versus phasing out fossil fuels. The overwhelming judgement: 71 to 29 percent against eliminating fossil fuels.
So Democratic Party policy falls into two categories for moderate Hispanics: The ones that are low priority, and the ones they actively hate.
The Democratic Party is indeed in trouble, and once Jeffrey Blehar gets past the requisite NRO anti-Trump sneers, he correctly fingers the social justice culprits.
The Democratic Party is being pulled apart by horses: On one hand, the party is increasingly held in contempt by once reliable voter demographics (Hispanics, African Americans, working-class men) as out-of-touch elitists taking orders from the Ivy League and the progressive ultra-left. On the other hand — and just as relevantly — the party is crippled from within by that same hard-left faction, which has held the ideological whip-hand over Democrats’ social agenda for a decade now.
These people are the problem. The inflexibly ratcheting social demands of the progressive activist/academic elite are the reason Democrats are in enormous trouble and will be even after Trump is forgotten. And these people are both practically and (more importantly for Democratic politics) morally entrenched within the party at all levels except the top strategic layer. They will not concede power easily, if at all. A civil war thus brews in the Democratic Party’s intellectual/activist wing against its reform-minded moderates. (Grab your popcorn.)
I’m not sure that the entire cadre of “reform-minded moderates” with any appreciable role within the party itself could fill a high school basketball arena. Within the ranks of the DNC itself, I doubt they could fill a Denny’s. But the corrupt wing of the party has indeed come to the realization that the policies of the insane wing are so unpopular that the corrupt wing is in danger of longer being able to rake off its usual graft, hence the crisis. Too bad for them that they’ve essentially ceded the Party’s entire ideological apparatus to the insane wing, and the predominately over-60 corrupt wing has no viable way to change course or purge their own institutions.
Another obvious example beckons: The hilarious plight of David Hogg, the whippet-faced punk set to be voted out of his newly acquired vice chairmanship at the Democratic National Committee next month for being a mutinous weasel, is emblematic of how the Democratic Party is currently consuming itself in internecine war. Hogg, recall, was essentially given the gig by a bunch of older, clueless Democratic Party grandees who voted for him in the hopes he would help bring disaffected young progressives back into the fold. Instead Hogg understands himself to be working not for the Democratic Party, but rather for the progressive movement — hence his announcement that he would use his position and powers to support primary challengers to insufficiently woke Democratic incumbents.
The future looks even more grim for the Democrats for structural reasons. The 2030 census is expected to subtract a swath of House seats (and thus electoral votes) from California and New York, in favor of red states like Florida and Texas. While this bodes ill for remaining Republican incumbents in those states (who can expect to be brutally redistricted away by 2032), it bodes in many ways even worse for the remaining Democrats, who will be left fighting over the division of a shrinking pie.
Understand: A significant number of those currently angry with the Democrats are angry at them for their failure to resist Donald Trump volubly enough, not for being too far to the left. These are the people Democrats absolutely must carry reliably as part of any victorious national coalition, given their preponderance within the party electorate. They will make demands accordingly. If anything, expect the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in its biggest states to lean even more progressive in years ahead as the moderates lose internal battles for position.
There are no Democrat moderates, only Zuul. Assuming Zuul is a 400-pound, purple-haired tranny screaming about Gaza…
After five years of letting Antifa run wild in the Pacific northwest, the FBI is finally investigating.
The FBI has indicated it will investigate the attack on a Christian group and the cops who came to intervene after a Memorial Day weekend melee in Seattle.
After the attack and outrageous response by Seattle’s Mayor Bruce Harrell, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino issued this statement: “We have asked our team to fully investigate allegations of targeted violence against religious groups at the Seattle concert. Freedom of religion isn’t a suggestion.”
I claimed in this must-read background story, Seattle Attack Offers More Proof That Antifa Thugs Are Just Democrat Anti-Christian Shock Troops, exactly what the title says, and that these anti-Christian attacks are nothing new. Further, after watching these groups for years, I can attest that the Seattle and Portland Antifa groups intermingle and help each other out, as Andy Ngo points out above.
Hopefully the current investigation will also target their finding sources and start bringing RICO charges against the entire terrorist network. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“[Texas] House Passes Immigration Enforcement Bill Mandating Local ICE Cooperation. Lawmakers approved legislation requiring counties with jails to enter into immigration enforcement agreements with the federal government.”
President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to fast-track the development and deployment of advanced nuclear reactors on Friday culminating a dramatic policy shift aimed at revitalizing the U.S. nuclear energy sector.
Flanked in the Oval Office by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump declared nuclear power “a hot industry” and praised it as “very safe and environmental.”
Burgum called it “a huge day for the nuclear industry,” and added, “Mark this day on your calendar. This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of over regulation of an industry.”
These orders aim to strip away what the administration describes as decades of regulatory overreach that have stifled innovation and stagnated the industry. “America’s greatness has always come from innovation,” Burgum said. “We led post-World War Two in all things nuclear. But then we’ve been stagnated. We’ve choked it with over regulation.”
The first of Trump’s executive orders directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to accelerate research and development, speed up reactor testing at national labs, and initiate a two-year pilot program for reactor construction.
A second order clears regulatory hurdles for the DOE and the Department of Defense (DOD) to build reactors on federal land — efforts that will bypass the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) entirely by using the agencies’ own regulatory authority.
The Trump administration has intensified the U.S.-China trade war by suspending exports of critical American technologies to China, including jet engine parts, semiconductor design software, specialized chemicals, and industrial machinery. The move follows Beijing’s recent decision to restrict shipments of rare earth minerals to U.S. firms. In a further escalation, Washington also announced plans to begin revoking visas for Chinese students in sensitive research fields.
Snip.
Adding to the trade tensions, sources familiar with the matter told The New York Times overnight that the U.S. Commerce Department had suspended certain export licenses allowing U.S. companies to supply engine parts and technology to China’s state-owned aircraft manufacturer, Comac (Commercial Aircraft Corp of China).
Comac has stockpiled engines and parts in anticipation of potential trade restrictions. Still, over time, the move could significantly undermine China’s aviation. The company’s C919 passenger jet—its flagship jet to challenge rival Boeing and Airbus—relies heavily on GE Aerospace–Safran’s LEAP engines.
Keep in mind that certain semiconductor parts had already been embargoed under Biden. A complete embargo of semiconductor parts is going to screw China’s semiconductor industry, as some of those parts simply can’t be sourced locally, to say nothing of losing access to trained maintenance techs, software upgrades, etc.
Ukraine claimed credit for two explosions in Vladivostok, which is on Russia’s Pacific coast and is a whopping 6,800km from Ukraine.
Saudi Arab wants you to know that he stands with Israel because Palestinians suck:
An Arab man from Saudi Arabia in a message to Palestinians:
"Who are you trying to fool? You have no land and no case. This land belongs to Israel for the people of Israel. You Palestinians are evil in any country you set foot on!"
California starts backing away from letting boys compete in girls events. Timidly and halfheartedly, to be sure, but something vaguely resembling progress. Gavin Newsom’s secret 2028 presidential race polling must show that tranny pandering is killing him in any general matchup…
A bill to make Daylight Savings Time permanent has passed both the Texas house and senate and heads to Governor Greg Abbott’s desk to be signed, but can’t take effect until federal law changes to accommodate it.
MSNBC’s new prime time lineup, which debuted on May 5th, failed to connect with viewers in its first three weeks as the network saw its audience decline to near record lows – especially in the key 25-54 age demographic.
Overall for May, MSNBC dropped 41% in the primetime demo and 34% in the total day demo compared to May of 2024. In total viewers, the network was down 33% across total day and 24% in prime time. MSNBC’s total day demo viewership sank to 49,000 average viewers and 73,000 in prime time – its second worst ever showing for a month behind January of 2025.
Fox News was the only of the big three networks to see year-over-year gains for May, up 21% in total viewers and 22% in total day demo viewers compared to 2024. In prime time, Fox gained 23% in total viewers and was up 32% in the demo.
CNN was down 24% in total day viewers and 27% in the daytime demo, while in prime time the network dropped 18% in total viewers and 21% in the demo. CNN’s prime time average came in at only 426,000 total viewers, compared to Fox News’s 2.5 million viewers and MSNBC’s average of 877,000 viewers.
Why would you even bother to advertise on MSNBC? 79,000 is less people than fill a big college football stadium on a Saturday…
Speaking of CNN, the red-pilling of Jake Tapper continues apace. His son is a gamer and high school football player who wants to be a policeman, so naturally lefty sorts immediately assumed he was a racist.
And despite his book tour, Tapper’s ratings are down as well. Why, it’s like viewers believe Tapper will continue to lie to protect Democrats in the future…
100% of studio headed by woman who won’t hire white people laid off.
The city of Austin wants to spend $5.8 million on art about hybrid plant women for an airport expansion.
The Austin City Council is set to vote again on art for the airport expansion. After postponing the vote because of outrage for using out of town artist. Well they're back at it. 1/5 Item 1 the biggest chunk: Saya Woolfalk not to exceed $5.8 million is out of NYC pic.twitter.com/SiApWQVc4P
In 2018, Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, devised a way to turn ordinary wood into a material stronger than steel. It seemed like yet another headline-grabbing discovery that wouldn’t make it out of the lab.
“All these people came to him,” said Alex Lau, CEO of InventWood, “He’s like, OK, this is amazing, but I’m a university professor. I don’t know quite what to do about it.”
Rather than give up, Hu spent the next few years refining the technology, reducing the time it took to make the material from more than a week to a few hours. Soon, it was ready to commercialize, and he licensed the technology to InventWood.
Now, the startup’s first batches of Superwood will be produced starting this summer.
“Right now, coming out of this first-of-a-kind commercial plant — so it’s a smaller plant — we’re focused on skin applications,” Lau said. “Eventually we want to get to the bones of the building. Ninety percent of the carbon impact from buildings is concrete and steel in the construction of the building.”
To build the factory, InventWood has raised $15 million in the first close of a Series A round. The round was led by the Grantham Foundation with participation from Baruch Future Ventures, Builders Vision, and Muus Climate Partners, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.
InventWood’s Superwood product starts with regular timber, which is mostly composed of two compounds, cellulose and lignin. The goal is to strengthen the cellulose already present in the wood. “The cellulose nanocrystal is actually stronger than a carbon fiber,” Lau said.
The company treats it with “food industry” chemicals to modify the molecular structure of the wood, he said, and then compresses the result to increase the hydrogen bonds between cellulose molecules.
“We might densify the material by 4x and you might think, ‘Oh, it’ll be four times strong, because it has four times the fiber.’ But it’s actually more like 10 times stronger because of all these extra bonds that get created,” Lau said.
The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better.
Some grains of salt are probably in order here, as this sounds just a little too good to be true, and there are always concerns about material longevity. But materials science is constantly advancing, so maybe this actually will pan out.
“Elon Musk Leaves Job Of Making Government More Efficient For Much Easier Job Of Sending Humans To Mars.”
In an under-reported story, a treasure trove of information about Russia’s nuclear weapon infrastructure has been hacked and released.
A massive security breach has exposed terrifying details about Russia’s rapidly expanding nuclear weapons programme, including what experts say is a significant advance in hypersonic missile technology. Documents obtained and analysed by German magazine Der Spiegel and Danish investigative outlet Danwatch reveal that Western companies—including the German gypsum manufacturer Knauf—are supplying materials used to expand Russia’s secretive nuclear weapons bases.
The leaked files include detailed blueprints and procurement lists from Russian military construction projects, providing rare insight into the infrastructure behind Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. Among the materials specified are cement, plaster, adhesives, insulation, and cladding, many supplied by Western firms. Knauf, based in Iphofen, Bavaria, features prominently. Although the company has publicly distanced itself from its Russian operations, the documents show it still controls its Russian subsidiaries.
At one point, one of these subsidiaries was even classified as “systemically important” within Vladimir Putin’s economy, underlining the company’s continued strategic role in supplying construction materials vital to Russia’s military build-up.
The documents detail construction at the nuclear base near Yasnyj, featuring blueprints for watchtowers and military facilities. European military experts confirmed some sites—including Yasnyj—have been equipped with Russia’s Avangard system, a hypersonic glide vehicle designed to evade missile defences by manoeuvring at extreme speeds.
Like all Russia’s hypersonic missiles, I have grave doubts that Avangard (first announced in 2019) comes anywhere near its Wunderwaffen specs.
Satellite imagery analysed by Der Spiegel shows these sites have been modernised with reinforced structures, upgraded defences, and sensor technology, built from higher-grade materials than in previous decades.
New missile silos, designed to house around 900 strategic warheads, are better fortified and concealed.
The leaked procurement data also reveals how Russia is getting around Western sanctions. Direct deliveries from Germany to Russian defence entities are banned, but Russian buyers use intermediaries.
One example is a small firm in Yekaterinburg, which won a contract to buy Knauf plaster for the 368th regiment at Yasnyj.
A Knauf spokesperson told Der Spiegel: “The management of the Knauf Group and the Knauf family condemn Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”
But evidently not enough to stop doing business with them.
The revelations come amid mounting concern over Russia’s expanding nuclear arsenal and the international implications of Moscow’s continued military modernisation despite sanctions.
As before, I continue to have doubts as to how much nuclear weapons modernization Russia can pay for. The United States is going to spend some $634 billion this decade maintaining its nuclear deterrent. The U.S. spends more money maintaining nuclear weapons in a given year than Russia spends annually on its entire military.
Danwatch has more information on the breach, but the top of the page is very slide-show heavy before you get to the meat at the bottom.
Danwatch, in collaboration with German Der Spiegel, can for the first time reveal previously unknown details about the enormous upgrade of the military infrastructure at Russia’s most protected facilities.
Together we have analyzed more than two million documents relating to Russian military procurement that Danwatch systematically retrieved from a public database over a period of many months. The Russian authorities have gradually restricted access to the database, but we managed to circumvent these restrictions by using a veriety of digital techniques, including a network of servers located in Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus.
Given computer security standards in most organizations, the idea that sensitive information was just sitting on a publicly accessible server for years at a time is entirely too plausible.
The documents reveal how numerous new facilities have been built across all of Russia: Entire bases have been almost leveled and rebuilt from the ground up; hundreds of new barracks, watchtowers, control centers and storage buildings have been erected; and several kilometers of underground tunnels have been excavated.
I can’t imagine that Putin is pleased that every nation in the world now has precise location targeting information for those sites…
Attorney General Ken Paxton continues to lead Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in polling for the 2026 U.S. Senate race, according to a new survey released on Wednesday.
The poll conducted by the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center at Texas Southern University puts Paxton up 43 percent to Cornyn’s 34 percent in a head-to-head matchup among likely GOP primary voters.
The poll surveyed 1,200 registered voters, which is a pretty decent sample size this far out. The demographics of the poll (page 3) slightly oversamples women but otherwise isn’t too far out of line, and that mild oversample shouldn’t skew things Paxton’s way.
The race is already one of the most anticipated across the country with tens of millions of dollars expected to be spent just in the primary.
If Congressman Wesley Hunt (R-TX-38) — who is flirting with a run himself and is already running personal ads across the state — is thrown into the mix, Paxton polls at 34 percent to Cornyn’s 27 percent and Hunt’s 15 percent. Hunt is behind Paxton head-to-head by 30 points, while he’s only 8 points behind Cornyn.
Net favorable ratings among those Republican voters show Paxton at +46, Cornyn at +23, and Hunt at +30 — with 46 percent of respondents saying they don’t know enough about the last to have an opinion.
Cornyn has the highest percentage, 23 percent, of GOP respondents who said they would never vote for him, and Paxton has the highest percentage, 42 percent, of those who would “definitely consider” voting for him.
Half of GOP respondents said that an endorsement by President Donald Trump is likely to influence for whom they ultimately vote.
The survey included net favorable ratings for six potential 2026 U.S. Senate candidates — three Republicans and three Democrats — which showed among likely general election voters:
Colin Allred: +7, with 17 percent unknown
Ken Paxton: EVEN, with 12 percent unknown
Beto O’Rourke: -6, with 8 percent unknown
John Cornyn: -8, with 14 percent unknown
Joaquin Castro: +7, with 40 percent unknown
Wesley Hunt: +9, with 53 percent unknown
I really only want to focus on the Republican numbers but, man, sure seems like Texas voters are suffering from Beto fatigue, doesn’t it?
All three Republicans are ahead of each potential Democratic candidate in head-to-head matchups, with the closest margin coming between Paxton and Allred, the former being 2 points up on the latter.
So far, the only two candidates in the race are Cornyn and Paxton, while Allred, O’Rourke, and Hunt have publicly stated their consideration of a run; Castro has only been evaluating the prospect behind the scenes.
I often say that polls this far out are meaningless, but a poll showing a challenger up big over an entrenched incumbent is the exception to that rule. The usual dynamic is that potential donors sit on the sidelines when a challenger goes after an entrenched incumbent out of fear that they might be throwing their money away. A poll result like this, showing Paxton significantly ahead of Cornyn, is likely to knock those fundraising spigots wide open. If memory serves, at this point in 2011, Ted Cruz was polling single digits against David Dewhurst.
Some will point out that Paxton, having successfully run statewide before, goes into the race with significantly more statewide recognition than the average challenger. This is true, but it wasn’t sufficient for Kay Baily Hutchison in her 2010 gubernatorial run against Rick Perry; save one margin of error 2 point lead for Hutchison, the polls in the race constantly showed Perry ahead. Likewise, it didn’t help George P. Bush in his primary attempt against Paxton in 2022, and I don’t remember a single poll showing Bush ahead.
Some readers have been asking for an update on this race. Well, now you have one. Cornyn is in serious trouble.
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