Posts Tagged ‘railroads’

LinkSwarm For September 25, 2026

Friday, September 25th, 2026

The Supreme Court green-lights verifying American citizenship for voting, fraud, fraud, and more fraud, Trump gets Greenland without having to buy it, Cruz looks at EPIC City terrorism ties, the Clancy holdout juror speaks, some horrifying child abuse cases, and completely different horrifying murder house, and a surprising amount of Norm Macdonald.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Supreme Court Clears Trump Admin To Use Voter Citizenship Verification.”

    The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 said the Trump administration can use an updated immigration database to verify the citizenship of voters.

    A majority of justices agreed to stay pending the outcome of an appeal of a June order from a federal judge that barred the use of a revamped database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.

    U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan had found that federal officials were violating the privacy rights of American citizens by disclosing the citizenship status and Social Security numbers, among other data, in the restructured database. She vacated the 2025 update, which connected Social Security information to the system.

    A federal appeals court later upheld the decision.

    Trump administration officials then asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing in a Sept. 8 brief that the order “threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by states to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”

    Six justices sided with the administration. In a per curiam opinion, they said that claims from the organizations that sued over the updated database “likely lack merit,” including the allegation that federal officials are violating federal laws, because Congress authorized the Department of Homeland Security to request and receive citizenship information and immigration status from other agencies, including the Social Security Administration, in a 1996 statute called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

    The majority also said that keeping in place the prohibition “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies.”

    States regularly use the system. Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden recently said the state in the fall of 2025 ran the names of its 18 million registered voters through the database and identified 2,724 people who may be noncitizens.

    Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

  • “USDA Targets 170 NYC Retailers in SNAP Fraud Sweep. ‘SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,’ White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said.”

    The Trump administration has stopped more than $5.8 billion in SNAP fraud since taking office, and its latest sweep just hit New York City, where hundreds of undercover investigations led to enforcement action against 170 retailers across all five boroughs.

    The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced “Operation SNAP Back” on Friday as part of a broader push against retailer fraud in the nearly $100 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

    “This is just the latest action in the Trump Administration’s fight against fraud. The message is clear, if you accept any portion of an annual $100 billion taxpayer program, you must follow the rules or face the consequences,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said. “We owe it to every American taxpayer to safeguard their hard-earned dollars, and these latest enforcement actions are just a small part of the Food and Nutrition Administration’s efforts to remove criminals and bad actors from food stamps.”

    The cases involve SNAP trafficking, where benefits are exchanged for cash, along with retailers accused of allowing benefits to be used for alcohol and other ineligible non-food items. USDA says penalties can range from temporary suspension to permanent disqualification and monetary fines. Several cases were also referred to the USDA Office of Inspector General for possible criminal investigation and prosecution.

    Investigators used undercover purchases at stores suspected of violating SNAP rules. Some retailers were caught exchanging benefits for cash, while others allegedly processed transactions for prohibited products.

    “SNAP benefits should go to Americans, not fraudsters or illegal immigrants,” White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud Executive Director Scott Brady said. “And thanks to Secretary Rollins, such waste and abuse will stop.”

  • Funny how this keeps happening: “Reporter finds no kids at Somali-run daycares in Seattle.”

    Here’s your reminder that the fraud is still continuing – boldly, even! – after months of nonstop reporting about it.

    Katie Daviscourt of the Post Millennial did some looking into Somali-run daycares in the Seattle area, many of which receive tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars monthly, and you’ll never guess what she found.

    Most showed no signs of kids.

    Many neighbors say they’ve never seen anything that looks like a daycare in the area!

    These families get together, watch each other’s kids sometimes, incorporate as a “daycare,” and collect tens of thousands a month.

    Here’s the PM:

    In total, Daviscourt reported that in just two neighborhoods there were over $5 million in potential abuses of taxpayer funds, and they had gone to over 20 locations reporting to be daycare locations. Under Seattle’s Child Care Assistance Program, daycares can request government funding in order to back their businesses when they are caring for low-to-middle-income families.

  • “Trump Administration Removes 760,000 ACA Enrollees, Citing Fraud and Improper Enrollment.”

    Vice President JD Vance and the White House’s anti-fraud task force canceled Affordable Care Act policies covering more than 760,000 people, the administration announced Tuesday, citing suspected improper and fraudulent enrollments.

    The task force, along with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimates the move will save taxpayers $2.2 billion.

    Following the cancellation of 315,000 enrollments, the vice president said officials are going to conduct “additional verification” on about 419,000 more enrollees, whom they suspect may be improperly enrolled or ineligible for the program. Similarly, the Trump administration is banning some insurance brokers who are thought to be complicit in the fraudulent enrollment.

    “We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled,” Vance said. “We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits.”

    Snip.

    “This is what the fraud task force is all about,” the vice president said, alongside CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and other senior administration officials at Tuesday’s press conference. “Saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important” are not victim to waste and fraud.

    Oz noted that CMS has issued termination notices to hundreds of brokers, including 469 in late August, and has placed a moratorium on new agents and brokers while officials investigate the eligibility of the additional 419,000 enrollees.

    “There will be no new brokers for Obamacare in this country for the next six months, and we do not feel at all conflicted about that decision, because most of the fraud, a disproportionate amount of the fraud, is taking place from these individuals,” Oz said.

    The ACA — colloquially known as Obamacare — was passed in 2010 under former President Barack Obama.

    And its baleful effects on health care and the federal budget live on…

  • “California’s Shadow Welfare System for Illegal Immigrants.”

    California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, devoting more than $180 billion annually to food, health care, and other programs for the poor and downtrodden. To sustain the arrangement, the state imposes the nation’s highest tax rates.

    In theory, these programs are supposed to help struggling Californians. In reality, many serve large numbers of illegal immigrants. Today, California oversees a shadow welfare system that allows noncitizens to receive health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones on the taxpayers’ dime.

    We visited four public-services offices in Southern California, each of which admitted that illegal aliens can enroll in public-welfare programs or receive benefits on their children’s behalf. In total, California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal immigrants in the last fiscal year. The state’s shadow welfare system, it seems, shows no signs of slowing down.

    Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.

    “If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”

    In Los Angeles, we heard more of the same. We asked another welfare officer about the benefits available to illegal immigrants and their children. While some state programs are closed to illegals, we learned, they are open to those aliens’ U.S.-born children.

    “If you were born here and the child was born here, you get money for two,” the officer said of CalWORKs, the state’s version of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. “Because she is not and the child is, she only gets money for the child, and not for her.”

    These benefits add up. In California, illegal immigrants can qualify for CAPI, public health insurance, and various tax credits. Their children qualify for others, including CalWORKs and, as in other states, Section 8 rental subsidies. All told, a family of five in California with two illegal-alien parents, two U.S.-born children, and one illegal-alien grandparent can receive public services worth more than $100,000 per year.

    State leaders are proud of it. In a recent podcast episode, Governor Gavin Newsom bragged about his “controversial” decision to extend Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrants. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, encouraged people to sign up for the California Earned Income Tax Credit, a program whose promotional materials assure applicants that “no Social Security number” is “no problem.”

    Snip.

    Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens. To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.

    Medicaid is a good example. Federal law prohibits states from using federal dollars to provide wraparound coverage to illegal immigrants. So, California used a state-funding “bucket” within its Medi-Cal program to extend “full-scope” coverage to illegal aliens. The expansions enrolled some 1.7 million people, costing the state an estimated $10 billion annually—more than twice what the state legislative analyst originally projected.

    California also uses a distinct legal category that enables certain migrants to qualify for state programs. The state deems certain aliens to be “permanently residing under color of law”—living in California with the “knowledge and permission” of immigration enforcement—and allows them to use this designation to enroll in Medi-Cal, CAPI, and other government programs. In practice, because aged or disabled individuals are typically not deported, this means elderly foreign retirees can arrive in California and receive extensive benefits.

    Another way that California shuffles cash to illegal immigrants is through those aliens’ children. CalWORKs allows illegal-immigrant parents to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born kids. BenefitsCal, the state’s welfare clearinghouse, even tells applicants that the program will accept a “statement” that the applicant “intend[s] to file or [is] taking steps to become federally eligible” to qualify for the program.

    This model—permissive rules and large loopholes—costs the state billions per year. As benefits and eligibility continue to expand, that figure will only increase in the years ahead.

    California shows no sign of paring back this largesse. In 2022, Newsom signed a bill into law that extended taxpayer-funded food benefits to illegal low-income residents. Beginning next October, qualified Californians 55 and older will become eligible for that program, regardless of immigration status. California’s Legislative Analyst estimates that it could cost up to an additional $400 million a year.

    Is there any doubt that California Democrats love illegal aliens far more than citizens? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “The Smell of Corruption at Karen Bass’ L.A. Homeless Authority.

    California Democrats pulled up the ladder to prevent the likes of Nick Shirley and local reporters like JJ Smith, Amy Reichert, and many others from finding out where millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars were fraudulently spent.

    In my story, Karen Bass Feels Heat From Feds Over Millions in Stolen and Laundered ‘Homeless’ Funds, we learned that Bill Essayli, who’s supposed to be the U.S. attorney in Central California (LA area) but isn’t because John Thune can’t do his job, this week announced the arrests and indictments of four individuals who had stolen millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars. They were supposed to house and help the homeless, but they helped themselves instead.

    After the indictments were announced and after the U.S. House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Authority operators to please come to Washington to have a little chat — under oath — the homeless authority announced it no longer wanted to receive federal funding and, in fact, plans to get out of the homeless business entirely.

    Bass and the people in Los Angeles who have run this agency into the ground after bilking taxpayers for years are getting out of the homeless business.

    The California Post reports, “LAHSA will not seek to retain responsibility for the annual application for federal homelessness funding, the Homeless Management Information System, the annual point-in-time count or the coordinated-entry system.”

    The same federal funding that came from your pockets and mine. The same federal funding lost after these alleged California homeless advocates threw piles of cash in front of an industrial fan and pointed it in the general direction of people who deserve to be in prison.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • The enemy within: “Poll: 59% of Dems support military coup against Trump, 32% support assassination.”
  • “FP-7 Pelican Ballistic Missile Used to Strike Moscow! Oil Refinery & Warehouse Hit Hard!”
  • Follow-up: “Satellite imagery shows significant damage to Moscow Oil Refinery after Ukraine’s drone strike yesterday. Multiple strikes are recorded and oil tanks confirmed destroyed. Additionally, a Pantsir booster intercepted a car.”
  • “Big Drone Strike on Perm Oil Refinery! 1,500km from Ukraine!” Multiple strikes on a refinery they previously hit in March.
  • “Kuibyshev Oil Refinery Hit Hard by Drones.” Again.
  • “Ukraine Targets Russian Rail Logistics: Two Trains & Fuel Tank Cars Hit By Drones.”
  • More: “Operation Barrel: Multiple Russian Fuel Trains and Tank Cars Destroyed!”
  • “Multiple Aircraft Confirmed Destroyed at Rostov: An-12 & An-26 Transporters and X2 Mi-8 Helicopters.”
  • “Big JDAM Air Strike on Troop Concentration in Bilytske, Donetsk.” Early in the war, Ukraine couldn’t have carried out a JDAM strike, due to fears of Russian aircraft and SAM batteries, indicating serious Ukrainian degradation of those categories of Russian weapons.
  • “Huge Explosion as Ukraine Hits Fuel/Ammo Storage in Zaporizhzhia.”
  • “Ukraine Hits Warehouse Loaded with Ammunition Shells: Big Blast.” “This was in Huliaipole, Zaporizhzhia.”
  • More winning: “Cuba Hit With National Power Grid Collapse As Oil Sources Dry Up.”

    Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity. This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it’s the most utility shutdown events in the country’s recent history.

    Even when Cuba’s grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time. Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff.

    “Protocols are now in place to begin ​the gradual restoration of the system,” said Felix Estrada, an ⁠official with Cuba’s National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of ​scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of ​the city remained completely dark.

    Many exhausted residents ​of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.

    “Yesterday I’d gone without ‌power ⁠for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed,” said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.

  • The U.S. is spending $500 million on laser weapons, and some have already been deployed in theater.

    Iranian citizens have witnessed some dazzling laser shows recently — but they’re not the kind you’d see at a Metallica concert.

    The US military has been deploying lasers in the Strait of Hormuz to knock out regime hardware, taking out “drones and incoming cruise missiles at a much lower cost than using more expensive kinetic weapons like missiles,” the Department of War recently confirmed.

    The US project to harness laser power has been 50 years in the making and outstrips the capabilities of any other military on Earth.

    A linked story suggests it’s the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Greg Gutfeld is rightly upset that Austin’s commie twerp of a U.S. rep is more upset at an illegal alien getting shot than the murder of Andrew Wimsatt, an American citizen he theoretically represented.

  • How shadowy leftist NGOs pay to put their people into government positions.

    We often hear leftists accuse billionaires of buying government, and most times the accusations are at least partly off-base.

    But not always, and sometimes they are literally doing precisely that: putting privately funded leftists into government offices to run a parallel government that nobody ever voted for. It’s a technocrat’s wet dream.

    One such program, funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, placed and paid the salaries of “government employees” strategically inserted into Attorney General offices in Blue states, funding regulations and lawsuits aimed at targets that Bloomberg’s NYU-based NGO program identified as vulnerable to its pressure. The goal was, of course, fighting climate change.

    BREAKING: Bloomberg-Backed Climate Group Paying Salaries of Democratic State AG Officials Quietly Shuts Down Amid Congressional, Legal Scrutiny.

    “A group housed at the New York University School of Law and backed by billionaire climate activist Michael Bloomberg quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations. The so-called State Energy and Environmental Impact Center’s signature initiative involved placing paid, climate-focused “fellows” in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices nationwide as those offices sued the oil industry and other energy providers.”

    Think of it as a cousin to “Zuckerbucks,” where a private entity funds a program that places people in government offices as either quasi- or fully government employees, with a mandate to pursue the NGO’s agenda. The same sort of thing happens with grants to news organizations, where an outside group pays for employees or “coverage” of specific issues, and the stories are still technically the product of the news organization, but the content is directed at producing the results desired by the people who cut the checks.

    Snip.

    Bloomberg, cut a big check to NYU, which in turn established a program to place its people directly into the offices of State Attorneys General, where they proceeded to sue and harass businesses targeted by the organization.

    James Comer opened an investigation into the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, and out of the blue, it closed. He sought documents from it, and “poof!” It’s gone.

    Pretty sus, bro. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • How Angela Merkel destroyed Germany’s political center.

    In my view, Angela Merkel bears a grave responsibility for the collapse of the centre and the growing ability of the political extremes to set the agenda.

    The almost one-third of voters who would support Alternative für Deutschland in a national election are not fascists or Nazis. A substantial proportion are disillusioned CDU voters.

    What has disappointed these voters? First, what I see as Merkel’s failures on so many fronts: immigration. Security. Energy. A sustainable strategy for business and economic growth. Digitalisation. Infrastructure maintenance. The list is almost endless.

    Second, the extraordinary denial of reality that, in my assessment, Merkel allowed to take hold when it came to immigrants’ responsibility for antisemitism, violence against women, terrorism and gang crime.

    Coming from Denmark, where we have reliable statistics on all these matters, I find it frankly shocking to listen to the nonsense coming from Germany’s political elite.

    But I would also trace back to Merkel the rise of what is often called “Islamo-leftism” – a tendency that has recently gained ground in Sweden and is also growing in Germany. In Sweden, polls have indicated that 85 per cent of Muslim voters support parties to the left of centre, with almost one in five supporting the Left Party, Vänsterpartiet – a party tainted by antisemitism and the glorification of terrorism. I see no compelling reason to assume that the pattern in Germany is fundamentally different.

    My argument, then, is that it is not only the rise in support for the AfD that can be traced back to Merkel. The same applies to the growing support for parties on the German left that promote the political and religious views of a significant proportion of the people, Merkel invited to Germany. Not least on the Gaza question.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Both Democrats and the international left has derided President Trump’s focus on Greenland, saying the U.S. controlling it was a fantasy. Now that he’s signed an agreement with Denmark, I doubt they’re laughing now.

    The US-Greenland-Denmark agreement has now been published. I haven’t read it, but Arnaud Bertrand has. This is his analysis of the terms, which appear very favorable to the United States, and well calculated to achieve the goal of preventing undue influence over the Arctic by any hostile power.

    Snip.

    To sum up:

    – The US secured a permanent military foothold that even an independent Greenland would inherit whether it likes it or not
    – The US now has veto power over any non-NATO military presence in Greenland, and over who can invest in its strategic infrastructure and resources (beyond NATO and the EU)
    – Denmark signed away its say over the principle of new US bases, with only the right to discuss the “implementation details”
    – Danish authorities no longer set the rules for US military movement across the island
    – And all of it is now justified by the defense of “the American continent”

  • Lindsay Clancy holdout juror Michael P. Desronvil speaks out.

    Michael is a Catholic from a Haitian immigrant family and moved to Massachusetts when he was a young child.

    The liberal women who so badly want to destroy him for refusing to acquit a child killer do not know how to handle that. Their woke brains simply cannot compute how to proceed.

    Several jurors who wanted to let Clancy off the hook have claimed that Michael did not follow the jury instructions, but they have incriminated themselves with statements indicating they had an ideological agenda in the courtroom. Michael says he “kept getting cut off” by these other jurors, who apparently knew his own thoughts better than him.

    This lines up with a statement from a fourth juror who says she was ultimately badgered into changing her vote.”

    A female 4th juror comes forward and says the other jurors were pushing to acquit on *DAY 1*

  • In fact, a whole lot of basic jury procedures seem to have been discarded in the Clancy trial. “Lindsay Clancy jurors broke cardinal rule and used phones to RESEARCH killer mom during deliberations, holdout claims.”
  • “Feds arrest, indict hundreds in Trump voter fraud crackdown: ‘Catching it all over the country.’ The Justice Department says its crackdown on noncitizen voting and election fraud has already produced more than 200 arrests and indictments, with that number possibly doubling soon and state election officials themselves now facing potential charges for looking the other way.”

    Since the Trump Justice Department warned state and local election officials that they could be charged with allowing fraudulent voting activities, more than 200 arrests and indictments have been secured in a crackdown on election fraud and noncitizen voting, and that number could double soon, a top official revealed to Just the News.

    “I think there are a lot of nervous election officials because I think some of them know that they’ve been looking the other way when this is happening, and we’re catching it all over the country,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said Monday night in an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.

    Dhillon also hinted at further developments in the coming weeks, suggesting her department has developed evidence calling into question New Jersey’s claim that a computer glitch allowed thousands of foreigners to register to vote in that state and about 400 to actually cast ballots in violation of law.

    “I’m not sure we have the correct numbers from New Jersey. They’re not really cooperating with us, and so we will get to the bottom of what happened there. And you know, New Jersey tried to blame a vendor for a mistake or a glitch, quote unquote. But you know, I think there’ll be another side to that story,” she said.

    Snip.

    Over the weekend, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that his agency is investigating 1,620 cases of voter fraud involving noncitizens and has made 151 arrests. He said his department is also looking into an additional 300,000 cases based on states’ voter rolls.

  • That thing that never happens keeps happening. “DOJ Charges 16 Noncitizens in Voter Fraud Cases.”
  • “More Canadians now die from government-assisted “suicide” than Americans die from gun homicides.”
  • Howard Dean speaks to the ChiComs: “DNC Chairman Emeritus Howard Dean delivered the American welcome address at a China dialogue involving the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, a think tank identified in congressional commission testimony as ‘run by Chinese intelligence.’ The Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, which co-organized the event⁠, has an equally explicit allegiance. Its charter⁠ says it: ‘upholds the comprehensive leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Ted Cruz digs into EPIC City’s ties to CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.

    Ties between the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the proposed EPIC City development in North Texas came under scrutiny during a recent U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing chaired by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

    EPIC City, which has been criticized as an Islamic enclave and housing development exclusive to Muslims, is a proposal from the East Plano Islamic Center.

    The Wednesday hearing of the subcommittee on federal courts, oversight, agency action, and federal rights was titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.”

    Sen. Cruz addressed the fact that Democrat senators failed to attend the meeting, stating that “their campaign is now openly embracing terrorist organizations waging war on America.”

    Cruz heard from witnesses that alleged ties between CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and EPIC City.

    Arielle F. Klepach, senior litigation counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center, called attention to the connection in her written testimony.

    She likened the EPIC City development, later rebranded as “The Meadow” following significant backlash, to a pattern of “mega-mosque” building projects in Europe commonly motivated by “Islamist separatism.”

    This movement is a “deliberate attempt to cut Muslim communities off spiritually, intellectually, and culturally from the surrounding secular society,” with the building projects in particular “generally [containing] community-like features such as schools, libraries, and gyms,” according to Klepach.

    “The American version of this pattern is EPIC City,” Klepach said. “CAIR-Texas and CAIR-DFW have publicly defended EPIC City in the disputes, and CAIR’s national leadership has spoken at the EPIC mosque, reflecting an active advocacy relationship between CAIR and the EPIC religious community.”

    The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was designated a foreign terrorist organization by Gov. Greg Abbott late last year, along with the Muslim Brotherhood.

    The hearing also revisited CAIR’s role as an unindicted co-conspirator to the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). The foundation and five of its officials were convicted of “funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas” during a 2008 federal trial. CAIR was not charged in the case.

    Lara Burns, senior research fellow for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, drew the connection between CAIR and Hamas in her written testimony.

    “The United States Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee served as the original Hamas infrastructure in the United States, initially consisting of the HLF (the fundraising arm),” alongside others, according to Burns.

    “At the [2008] trial, still today the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in American history, [various arms of the Muslim Brotherhood] were identified as unindicted co-conspirators/joint ventures as was [CAIR],” she added.

    (Previously.)

  • A father-and-son serial killer house of horror found in Pennsylvania.

    A Pennsylvania father and son have come under suspicion after the son was discovered to be traveling with a woman with a fake ID that used the name of a missing woman.

    Police searched the home of the man and his dad and found the most disturbing scene imaginable.

    he investigation is still unfolding but this is some seriously unsettling stuff going on.

    Here’s the latest from ABC 6 in Philly on the now 7 missing women connected to this case against Eugene Horsch and his deceased father RC:

    Blair Tonzelli was 35 years old when she went missing in 2023. She was the first woman named in this case.

    Police say when Horsch was arrested, he was with a woman in possession of an identification card with Tonzelli’s name on it. The woman allegedly told police Eugene Horsch gave her the ID.

    Amy McHale was 44 years old when she was last seen in 2016. Shortly after news broke of Horsch’s arrest, her family told Action she was last seen at the W. Chew Avenue house.

    McHale had previously been married to Ray Horsch, who has also become a central figure in this case.

    Gabrielle Amarando was 22 years old when she disappeared in 2012.

    A childhood friend of Amarando told Action News that loved ones grew increasingly concerned when they stopped hearing from her…

    Roughly 14 years later, her family got the confirmation they were looking for.

    In August, police said the women were seen in photos and videos recovered during the investigation, in which both are seen alive and then later appearing to be dead.

    ‘Based on the video and photo evidence — if the images in the video are real and not altered in any way, based on their review — the M.E. would believe the individuals depicted in the images are deceased,’ Philadelphia Police Inspector Ray Evers.

    Maribel Fresses was the other woman seen in the videos and photos. She [was] 27 when she disappeared in 2018.

    Police also saw photos and videos of two other unidentified women, both alive and then dead, as well as video of the elder Horsch strangling a woman to death.

    Five urns believed to have the unidentified remains of five women were found in the home.

    Millions of photos and videos have so far revealed that at least 7 women who went missing ultimately met their demise at the hands of the Horsches.

    Shades of H. H. Holmes…

  • UK functionaries go out of their way to protect their precious illegal aliens. “British government mobilizes HUNDREDS of police and defense units to protect migrant boat from British protesters.”

    Third World migrants are being led across the channel by French authorities, where British police then escort them into harbor, put them aboard taxpayer-funded coach buses, and give them a police escort with hundreds of officers.

    Snip.

    Earlier in the day, British protesters gathered by land and by sea to peacefully demonstrate against a group of 60 or so migrants that was set to land in southern England in Gosport.

    Because of the protesters gathered along the coast, authorities had to scramble to find a new landing spot for the “newcomers.” The buses were seen with a massive police escort.

    The reason for the escort was due to the fear that the British protesters would get “mostly peaceful” and attack the invaders or the masked bus drivers who are helping traffic them into the country:

    One GB News reporter summed up the massive taxpayer expenditure that was spent to assist the migrants:

    The whole thing from start to finish today, for this one boat of 60-odd or however many it turns out to be, to go all the way flanked by a massive French ship, then to our [Royal National Lifeboat Institution] boats, then all of those resources pumped into Gosport.

    And THEN, it looks as though because of the local reaction, they’ve decided to not to that, take them down either to Eastport or Dover or somewhere else anyway.

    So goodness knows what the resources are going to be like there.

    We are talking MILLIONS of Pounds today alone, for a group of 60 illegal migrants.

    Is there any doubt the Labour government prioritizes importing illegal aliens into the country over taking care of their own citizens?

  • “Texas Daycare Faces Lawsuit For Running ‘Toddler Fight Club.'”

    Forget about Somali daycare fraud for a moment – have you heard about toddler fight club? A daycare in Fort Worth, TX is facing investigations and litigation after evidence showed staff abusing young children and forcing them to fight each other.

    One mother, Heather Harris, knew something was wrong when she picked up her 4-year-old son at the Arka Montessori Academy of Risinger daycare. He was crying uncontrollably and was covered in bruises. Employees told the mother her son had fought with another child, but their explanations did not add up, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Harris and her husband, Richard Harris. She insisted on seeing the classroom’s surveillance footage.

    The disturbing footage shows staff at the daycare swing a child around like a rag-doll and trying to force him to fight another child.

    I’m skipping right past the obvious “First Rule of Toddler Fight Club” joke to point out that if my (theoretical) kid were forced into that, both daycare and the employees would be facing both a huge civil lawsuit and criminal charges.

  • More horrifying child abuse: “Transgender ICU nurse arrested on multiple counts of abusing NICU baby at Michigan hospital.”

    [Kieran Ansley], a now-former nurse at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital has been charged with child abuse after a 4-month-old girl in his [sic] care was found with multiple broken bones and bruising.

    The injuries were noticed by the infant’s mother during an early morning visit in April, records show. Tests and a full skeletal survey found multiple fractures, including broken leg bones and multiple bruises, court records show. Bruising was found on the infant’s hands, arms, thigh, buttocks, abdomen and tongue, court records show.

    ‘The totality of the findings resulted in a diagnosis of pediatric physical abuse,’ court documents show.

    More horrifying details snipped. Hell’s too good for him.

  • “Texas Stock Exchange Sees First Listing Transfer. Wall Street is trading its loafers for a pair of cowboy boots.”

    Dallas’ “Y’all Street” continues to capitalize on momentum as the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) enters a new era of growth.

    North Texas has added a stock exchange alongside its iconic stockyards, and companies are beginning to flock to the TXSE’s transfer portal. TXSE opened in July, and September has seen the first corporate commitments and primary listing transfers.

    On September 16, Texas Capital’s Texas Equity Index exchange-traded fund (ETF) and Texas Oil Index ETF became the TXSE’s first primary listings. The company’s CEO, President, and Chairman, Rob Holmes, rang the bell on “Y’all Street” to celebrate the company’s primary listing transfer. Texas Capital was formerly listed on the Nasdaq.

    Holmes stated in a Bloomberg interview about the transfer, “Once this exchange came to fruition, it was our responsibility to look at the three exchanges and pick the best one for Texas Capital.”

    He praised the TXSE’s investor base as an affirmation of the exchange’s technological and strategic innovation. The TXSE saw over $275 million in total investment, with major investors including BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Charles Schwab.

    Competing securities exchanges include the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, both based in New York City.

    Holmes asserted that TXSE’s net present value (NPV) is “better” than its New York rivals.

    “On this exchange, instead of just paying a fee, we pay a fee, but at the end of the day we have a net cash position from the exchange,” he said.

    If someone can explain what that last sentence means, please do so in the comments…

  • “Democrat candidate caught crying in the back of cop car after DUI arrest. Washington state Democratic House candidate Krista Perez was seen crying, praying and sobbing in the back of a patrol car after her DUI arrest.” Washington state has a jungle primary, with two Democratic candidates for House of Representatives District 29-Position 1 (the state has 49 districts of two reps each) facing each other in November, so Republicans won’t be able to take advantage here.
  • Jay Leno’s Law, exempting classic cars from California’s draconian emissions regulations, was signed into law in a rare act of sanity from Governor Hairgel. But note it doesn’t take effect until January 1, 2028.
  • To break AIs, no need to ask it to calculate pi to the last digit. Asking how many “e”s in “seventeen” will do…
  • The many lighting tricks Stanley Kubrick used to shoot Barry Lyndon. (And if you haven’t seen Barry Lyndon, you should. I found it extremely funny…)
  • So Carrot Top tried to kill himself over attempted blackmail using a sex tape? Can’t say I’m a huge fan of his work, but he should avoid trying to off himself. And now, with that thin justification, here’s the classic Norm Macdonald bit on Carrot Top:

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Speaking of Norm Macdonald, if I had Netflix, I would watch this, though I suspect I’ve already seen 75% of it in YouTube clips.
  • “New Underground Railroad Established To Help Lone Black Juror Escape From Angry White Liberals In The North.”
  • “Canada Clarifies That By ‘Assisted Suicide’ They Mean ‘Totally Unsolicited Murder.‘”
  • “Husband In Critical Condition After Attempting Two Minutes Of Beginner’s Yoga.”
  • The Pittie who thinks he’s a cat:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    Austin Seeking Another Rail Boondoggle?

    Wednesday, August 26th, 2026

    You might remember Austin’s light rail boondoggle, which is now scaled back, behind schedule, and very possibly illegal. (For the current status on that project, see here.)

    Now more Austin elites, in the form of the Travis County Commissioner’s Court (an organization so far in the shadow of the Austin City Council that I didn’t previously have a tag for them) has funded the study of a high speed rail line between Austin and San Antonio, the price tag for which would be a staggering $13.5 Billion.

    A high-speed rail line between Austin and San Antonio would cost about $13.5 billion to build, according to a recent feasibility study commissioned by Travis County Commissioners Court.

    The study conducted by HNTB Corporation assessed the potential of a high-speed rail route between Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and the Amtrak station in San Antonio along State Highway 130 and Interstate 10.

    Running from an airport in one city to an Amtrak station in another? Who the hell is this line for, tourists who want to save money traveling to San Antonio? It certainly doesn’t seem geared for the benefit of actual Travis County residents, especially now that the theoretical Project Connect light rail link to Bergstrom has been cancelled.

    Also, if you’re going 130 to I-10 to San Antonio, you’re missing the bigger I-35 cities like Kyle, San Marcos and New Braunfels in favor of smaller cities Lockhart and Seguin. I guess the plan is to keep it high speed because almost no one will want to visit the smaller bergs on the train line.

    The proposed route would run at about 125 miles per hour with a travel time of about an hour between the two cities.

    Sure it would. Pretty much no U.S. “high speed rail” services hit their theoretical maximum because they stop too often and the track’s not straight enough to maintain top speed for long.

    Travis County approved $125,000 to fund the feasibility study in October 2025.

    The proposed 89-mile route presents challenges because of the many cross-street overpasses and an existing right-of-way that has minimal space to accommodate the rail route. These challenges contribute to the $13.5 billion price tag by requiring much of the route to be elevated.

    The high-speed rail would also cost $190 million to operate and maintain annually, according to the report.

    That works out to some $520,000 a day in ongoing operating costs paid by the taxpayers.

    The feasibility study did not include ridership or fare estimates for the proposed high-speed rail line.

    Acela serves just under 9,000 passengers a day. Even if the proposed Austin-San Antonio leg got that many (it won’t; even a thousand a day is probably too many), that results in a cost of over $4,000 per passenger per day over the first year in fixed costs alone. At 1,000 riders, it’s more like $36,000 a passenger per day the first year. For that price you could buy every rider their own Honda Civic, and save the taxpayer gobs of money over the other 364 days of the year (and 15-20 years more to boot). Including the ongoing costs adds a $520 taxpayer subsidy per rider per day.

    The actual Austin Amtrak ridership in 2025 was 47,030. Not per day. Not per week. Not per month. That’s the total yearly ridership to all destinations.

    Maybe my 1,000 estimate is way too optimistic.

    There’s also this: “A separate TxDOT study found expanded passenger service on existing tracks could cost as little as $800 million.” Even that is too much for how much such a line would actually be used. Intercity passenger rail is a money loser everywhere it’s run, and only sorta, kinda works in the northeast because of a much higher population density. Even there it’s heavily subsidized, and even the fastest train, Amtrak’s Acela, only saves just over an hour over a car trip between D.C. and New York City.

    Leftists everywhere love rail because it’s an endless source of graft in the planning and building stages, and a superior means of surveilling and controlling the population. How are you supposed to inflict socialism on the peasants if they can just climb in their car and drive away?

    All this is a boondoggle in search of a problem, as low cost mass transit between Austin and San Antonio already exists in the form of buses, with fares starting at as little as $11. But that’s not a desirable form of transportation for liberal elites, because riding a bus doesn’t show how smugly superior they are over ordinary people. Plus they have to rub shoulders with both the peasants they disdain and the illegal aliens they’ve inflicted on them.

    This proposed train project makes zero economic sense, benefits very few Austinites, costs taxpayers dearly, will be an endless source of graft, and, like California’s Train to Nowhere, will never actually be built.

    For all those reasons, expect Austin Democrats to keep pushing for it.

    LinkSwarm For August 1, 2025

    Friday, August 1st, 2025

    President Trump wins another huge (and hugely favorable) trade deal for America, more Obama/Clinton skullduggery exposed, a whole lot of sick perverts get arrested, Nigel Farage plays Cassandra, Russia gets hammered by both Ukraine and God, plus an unusually high amount of hypercars and Star Trek.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Winning: “Trump strikes massive trade deal with EU on energy, arms, tariffs.”

    The United States has reached a trade deal with the European Union after President Donald Trump pressured the group of nations, as well as others, to open up trade with the US using the threat of tariffs.

    While being joined by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Trump detailed the plans for the deal. “The European Union is going to agree to purchase from the United States $750 billion worth of energy.”

    “They are going to agree to invest, into the United States, $600 billion more than they’re investing already. So they’re investing a large amount of money. … They’re agreeing to open up their countries to trade at zero tariff,” Trump added. “So that’s a very big factor, opening up their countries. All of the countries will be opened up to trade with the United States at zero tariff, and they’re agreeing to purchase a vast amount of military equipment.”

    The president added that the number for the military equipment is not exact, and then also said the EU imports to the US will have a “straight across tariff of 15 percent” on automobiles and other goods. The tariffs on EU goods were previously in the single digits on average, according to the New York Times. The EU had hoped to reach an agreement for 10 percent across the board on tariffs.

    The Very Best People repeatedly told us that President Trump’s tariff strategy would inevitably plunge us into a trade war and send the economy into a recession, if not a recession. It turns out, once again, that Trump has far better grasp of negotiating strategy than they do.

  • How Trump is winning on trade:

    When Mr. Trump first unveiled his reciprocal tariffs, virtually all the important foreign countries flocked to make a deal with him; they ignored Communist China.

    Why is that? Because America’s the greatest country in the world. With the best economy.

    And nobody trusts the Chinese to do anything, much less honor a trade deal.

    What’s more, Mr. Trump and his team have already made a number of deals with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea.

    Talks with Mexico are constructive and will be extended.

    We can’t be sure, but it’s likely that the China talks will be extended.

    In general, Mr. Trump is charging a very modest 15 percent or 20 percent fee as the price for doing business with the greatest economy in the world.

    That modest fee could generate something like $400 billion a year in tariff revenues.

    And here’s his new wrinkle: vast foreign direct investment into America

    For example, $600 billion from the EU, and perhaps another $600 billion from Japan. Maybe $750 billion from EU energy purchases. Think clean burning LNG produced by America’s first in the world energy industry.

    Direct investment pledges of as much as $5 trillion or $6 trillion coming from governments and companies all around the world — including the Middle East. And even in Asia — with South Korea putting up $350 billion.

    We’ll learn more about how this direct investment is going to work, but the point is — the stimulus from all of that vastly outweighs any fiscal drag from the mostly moderate reciprocal tariff rates.

    That’s Mr. Trump’s brand-new wrinkle. And it’s a very clever ploy.

  • “Thousands of Russia-hoax docs found in “burn bags” inside “secret room” at FBI headquarters.”

    FBI Director Kash Patel found a trove of sensitive documents related to the origins of the Trump – Russia probe buried in multiple ‘burn bags’ in a secret room inside the bureau, sources told Fox News Digital.

    Sources told Fox News Digital that the ‘burn bag’ system is used to destroy documents designated as classified or higher.

    Sources told Fox News Digital that multiple burn bags were found and filled with thousands of documents.

    Sources exclusively briefed Fox News Digital on some of the contents of the classified annex — including that the U.S. intelligence community had credible foreign sources indicating that the FBI would play a role in spreading the alleged Trump – Russia collusion narrative — before the bureau ever launched its controversial Crossfire Hurricane probe.

    A source familiar with the contents of the classified annex told Fox News Digital that while it may not have been exactly clear in the moment what the intelligence collection meant, with the benefit of hindsight, it predicted the FBI’s next move ‘with alarming specificity.’

  • More.

    White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took members of the press corps to task over their refusal to cover newly released evidence that shows Hillary Clinton approved the Russian collusion hoax against Donald Trump.

    Leavitt’s comments come on the heels of a newly declassified appendix to the Durham Report that exposes a reported Clinton campaign plan to falsely accuse President Trump of collusion with Russia.

    Leavitt chided members of the press, telling them, “This is a story that every outlet in this room should be covering,” and that “This is further evidence that Hillary Clinton approved the Russia Hoax against President Trump. Her campaign financed it.”

    Leavitt added that “the FBI and the CIA were both weaponized to accelerate this hoax against then-candidate and former president Trump.”

    The Press Secretary told reporters that, “The president wants to see justice served and he trusts the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to implement that justice and hold these people accountable.”

    The so-called “Durham annex” to John Durham’s Special Counsel report was released yesterday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and brings previously classified information to light regarding the Clinton campaign’s plans to falsely tie Trump to Russia.

    In a press release, Grassley said, “History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump. This political weaponization has caused critical damage to our institutions and is one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history. The new Trump administration has a tremendous responsibility to the American people to fix the damage done and do so with maximum speed and transparency.”

    Maybe it’s time to bring this back:

  • The entire left is in the find-out phase.

    Travel back in time to the year 2021 and you might find yourself in the middle of a bizarre debate over the virtues of “cancel culture”. At the time the political left was aggressively trying to secure long term power within the US through a multi-pronged psychological offensive – A war on the minds of the masses designed to force Americans into submission.

    A big part of their strategy relied on the fundamentals of Cultural Marxism: The combination of Marxist mob tactics, artificial consensus and the exploitation of minority grievances as a vehicle for controlling speech. This was the rise of the “woke movement” to the halls of government.

    The root of their power was not martial. In fact, the political left is weak and largely astroturf with minimal ability to project power in a physical way. If conservatives wanted to destroy them tomorrow the task would be relatively easy. We don’t because many of us still have hope that our problems can be solved through peaceful discourse.

    What the leftists did have at their disposal was a massive institutional apparatus of government agencies, corporations, Big Tech and NGOs. The full might of the establishment cabal was on their side, which meant they had the means to enforce “cancel culture” and silence their ideological opponents.

    I don’t think there has ever been a psychological war on a population that was more pervasive and tyrannical. Not since Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China has a citizenry been under such a siege by their own government. The fact that we survived this event, defeated the onslaught and actually grew a grassroots anti-woke movement without the use of social media forums is truly mind blowing.

    Very few people today realize the level of victory that was achieved. We thwarted perhaps the largest 4th Generation “mind war” ever devised and we did it without any institutional access. We won by simple truth and word of mouth.

    Another tool that the leftists and globalists used was the mobilization of illegal migrants, gays and minorities as a shield against criticism or counter-protest. If conservatives and moderates fought back with superior debate or our own protest groups, we were immediately accused of racism, xenophobia and homophobia. Merely presenting an opposing view to the progressive machine was considered an act of evil.

    Large contingents within all of these groups were happy to go along with the agenda for numerous reasons.

    First and foremost, DEI allowed them to easily game the system. They could snatch up grants, subsidies, welfare, and leapfrog over more talented and more intelligent competitors in education and business simply because of their “marginalized status”.

    Secondly, the system under progressives was two-tier; leftists activists, illegals and minorities were given preferential protection while breaking the law and causing chaos. Conservatives were labeled terrorists for any act of defiance. We were banned from the largest web platforms. Some of us were targeted by the online mob and lost our jobs. Others were “de-banked” and threatened with ostracism from the economy. Still others were imprisoned.

    This imbalance of the law bred a culture of entitlement, especially within the LGBT cult and the black community. Illegal aliens were given carte blanche to enter the country and feed like parasites. Not only that, but they were treated like heroes coming to save the US from “population decline” and “labor shortages”.

    They all participated in the game willfully and joyfully. They were ALL part of the problem. But, of course, none of them ever thought the party would end or that they might end up facing consequences for their behavior. They joined in the feeding frenzy without considering the inevitable clap-back.

    The primary argument that leftists would often use to defend the application of cancel culture was that there was “no such thing as cancel culture”, only the righteous utilization of “consequence culture”. This was, of course, a misdirection. The word “consequence” suggests that a person deserves punishment for wrongdoing and that the leftists canceling him (or her) have the right to do so.

    Cancel culture was never about justice or karma, it was about suppression of anyone who disagreed with the political left. A corrupt group of psychopathic people with no support from the majority is in no position to dole out consequences. They can dole out harassment and intimidation, but not justice.

    In recent months, however, I think these people are finally beginning to understand what “consequence culture” really is and clearly they don’t like it.

    We told them over, and over, and over again that the left wouldn’t like it when the “new rules” they were creating got applied to them. And here we are.

  • Annals of human depravity: “FBI, DOJ arrest ringleaders of dark web child porn exploitation networks with over 120,000 users.”

    The Justice Department has announced the results of Operation Grayskull, a sweeping joint investigation with the FBI that dismantled four dark web sites dedicated to child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The operation has so far resulted in 18 convictions across multiple federal districts and significant sentences for offenders involved in the distribution and advertisement of CSAM.

    One of the most notable sentences came last week, when Thomas Peter Katsampes, 52, of Eagan, Minnesota, was sentenced to 250 months in prison, lifetime supervised release, and ordered to pay $23,000 in restitution. Katsampes pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to advertise and distribute child pornography. According to court records, he joined one of the dark web sites in 2022, actively advertised and distributed CSAM, including material depicting prepubescent children, and eventually became a site moderator responsible for enforcing posting rules and advising others on sharing illegal content.

  • “Houston ICE Arrests Over 200 Illegal Aliens With Child Sex Offenses Over Six Months. The past six months resulted in more such arrests than Houston ICE had in the entire 2024 fiscal year.”

    The Houston branch of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 214 illegal aliens who have either been charged with or convicted of child sex offenses over the past six months — more than it arrested in all of Fiscal Year 2024.

    Among the five illegal aliens captured and highlighted in an ICE press release published on Monday, four were from Mexico and were deported back there following their arrests. Forty-eight-year-old Jorge Zebra received convictions for two counts of sexual assault of a minor as well as “sexual indecency” with a minor. He was returned to Mexico in March.

    Mexicans Sergio Rolando Galvan Guerrero and Jesus Gutierrez Mireles were convicted for “aggravated sexual assault of a child” as well as for Driving While Intoxicated.

    Jose Guadalupe Meza, who’s been deported four other times, was convicted of both sexual assault of a child and theft. Meza was deported to Mexico on June 25.

    The lone criminal from El Salvador was Manuel Antonio Castro-Juarez, who was convicted for both sexual assault of a child as well as illegal entry, twice. He’ll be sent back to El Salvador for the third time, but is in ICE custody until necessary proceedings are completed.

  • “Former Texas National Guardsman Convicted of Smuggling Aliens. Mario Sandoval now faces up to 10 years in federal prison.”

    A Houston-based former member of the Texas National Guard who once served on the front lines of Operation Lone Star is now facing up to 10 years in prison after a federal jury convicted him of human smuggling.

    Mario Sandoval, a 27-year-old Houston resident and former national guardsman, was deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of Operation Lone Star, the Texas-led initiative launched in 2021 to curb illegal immigration. The operation mobilized both the Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety.

    Despite being released from his official orders, Sandoval remained in the Rio Grande Valley and, in July of last year, began smuggling illegal aliens north of the immigration checkpoint. Jurors were shown text messages confirming Sandoval’s coordination in the smuggling operation—including his role arranging drivers and alerting others to law enforcement locations. Surveillance footage also placed him near the checkpoint during the times those messages were sent.

    Sandoval was discharged from the Texas National Guard in October 2024. Although he claimed the texts were taken out of context and that no conspiracy existed, a jury found him guilty after a one-day trial and less than an hour of deliberation.

  • Nigel Farage warns of societal collapse in the UK.

    “We live increasingly in a lawless Britain… most people think that Britain has become lawless”, Farage remarked Monday at a press conference to launch a new law and order policy platform.

    “We’re actually facing, in many parts of our country, nothing short of societal collapse,” Farage warned, adding “People are scared to go out to the shops, scared to let their kids out. That is a society that is degraded, and it’s happening very, very rapidly.”

    Farage further suggested that Britain should leave the European Court of Human Rights in order to restore effective criminal deterrence.

    Farage maintains that the ECHR undermines the country’s ability to deport foreign criminals, terrorists, and illegal migrants, thereby weakening criminal deterrence.

    He contends that exiting the system would remove legal barriers imposed by foreign judges, and allow the UK to swiftly remove dangerous individuals, free up prison space, reduce taxpayer burdens, and send a strong message that crime by non-citizens will result in certain expulsion.

    This, in his view, would restore effective deterrence by ensuring consequences are enforced without interference, discouraging both criminal activity and illegal immigration.

    Among a range of policies he outlined to avoid a descent into societal collapse, Farage suggested outsourcing hardened criminals to foreign jails and a hard-line three-strikes and you’re out rule, meaning after three convictions there would be no more rehabilitation for offenders.

    He noted that one of the most egregious aspects of the collapse is that the government is obsessed with drilling it into the British people that everything is getting better when citizens can see the rampant degradation all around them.

    “Huge numbers of law-abiding, taxpaying Britons have also lost respect for the police but in a different way. The idea, the concept that we’re living in a system of two-tier policing and two-tier justice under two-tier Keir has really taken hold,” Farage urged.

    Farage noted that crimes such as shoplifting and drug taking have been allowed to become a part of everyday life in cities, and that one in three Londoners have now been victims of mobile phone theft.

    He vowed that his party will work to halve crime in five years if elected to parliament by becoming “the toughest party on law and order and on crime that this country has ever seen”, and instituting “zero tolerance policing.”

    Farage also floated the idea of Army run centres for repeat petty criminals to be held in and made to undergo a program of reform.

    He pointed to Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as Mayor of New York City as an example of how to restore law and order in a broken down society.

    The Tories could have been the party of border control and tough on crime policies, but their feckless wet leadership pissed the opportunity away.

  • Ukraine hits another fuel train.
  • And another rail hub.
  • Ukrainian troops also landed on the Tendrovo Spit, a long sandbar south of Kherson. I’m including this one because it includes a closer look at some of Russia’s drone jamming equipment.
  • Here’s some great outside-the-box thinking: A wounded Ukrainian soldier behind enemy lines was rescued by a drone lowering an E-bike to him.
  • 8.8 magnitude earthquake, tsunami hits Russian far east. No word on casualties, be the Rybachiy submarine base submarine was some 75 miles from the epicenter of the quake, and there’s some evidence the facilities were damaged.
  • It would take a heart of stone not to laugh: “‘Crisis’ at Media Matters, As It Cuts Staff, Struggles to Pay Legal Bills.” Golly, a whole lot of lefty outlets seem to be in trouble now that Trump47 is eliminating the graft at places like USAID… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • What too much winning looks like: “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will shut down by September’s end, the private non-profit that is funded almost entirely by Congress announced on Friday.”

  • Kamala Harris has announced that she would prefer not to endure another excruciating campaign highlighting what a horrible politician she is, and will not be running for governor of California.
  • Soros-funded prosecutor = brothel boom in Fairfax County. “How did the state’s largest municipality, a wealthy and highly educated suburb of Washington, D.C., become a sanctuary county for pimps, madams, and whorehouse operators? All signs point to the Commonwealth’s attorney, self-styled progressive prosecutor Steve Descano.””County Supervisor Pat Herrity said that about 80 to 100 ‘illicit massage businesses’ are ‘operating in plain sight today’ in the county.”
  • The latest event that’s now too dangerous to attend: Jazz festivals, as a crowd of black people beat two white people unconscious. Then Cincinnati Police Chief Teresa Theetge tried to downplay the attack saying that the assault was taken “out of context.”
  • “‘Medicaid Millionaire’: Louisiana Woman Facing Fraud Charges After Buying Lamborghini While Illegally Collecting Benefits.”

    Candace Taylor, 35, of Slidell, was arrested Monday after investigators found she underreported her income to qualify for the program. The Louisiana Bureau of Investigation launched its probe after a complaint from the state health department.

    The Fox News report says court records say Taylor ran six businesses that brought in over $9.5 million between 2020 and 2024. Bank records show deposits of $480,994, including more than $325,000 linked to her businesses.

    “From 2021 through 2024, Ms. Taylor continued to transfer tens of thousands of dollars between her personal and business accounts, with personal inflows consistently exceeding the eligibility thresholds for Medicaid,” the affidavit states.

    Despite this, Taylor allegedly kept renewing her benefits—most recently claiming $4,000 in monthly income without disclosing she owned the business.

    Authorities say her spending included $45,086 in Audi vehicle payments, a $100,000 wire to an exotic car dealer, and $13,000 for a 2022 Lamborghini Urus. She also allegedly withdrew multiple six-figure cashier’s checks for property, cosmetic surgery, jewelry, and luxury services.

    Unless it was very hot or very crashed, there’s no way she paid $13,000 for a Lamborghini Urus, as those things go for over $200,000. Maybe that was a down payment…

  • Progress on civil rights: “California Law Requiring Background Checks for Ammo Declared Unconstitutional.”
  • But the Democrat Party’s desire to disarm law-abiding American citizens never rests. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy filed a bill to raise the National Firearms Act tax to $4,709. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Australian doctor found guilty of professional misconduct for sharing Babylon Bee jokes.”

  • Bugs Bunny trial of Benjamin Netanyahu drags on, despite no evidence of any identifiable corruption.
  • “Rubio Declares That Maduro Is NOT The President Of Venezuela.”
  • Entertainment economics: Stephen Colbert isn’t worth $20 million a year. but South Park is worth over $1 billion.
  • “Texas Democrat Candidate Flips Out During Hearing, Winds Up Getting Arrested.” “Isaiah Martin’s attempt to filibuster the redistricting hearing ended in cuffs as he was dragged away from the microphone by a capitol security official.” Martin is currently running in a special election for the 18th Congressional District following the death of Shelia Jackson Lee, and is currently polling at 3%.
  • A WNBA game experienced a brief moment of excitement when someone threw a lime green dildo onto the court.
  • Get woke, go broke. “Jaguar CEO Adrian Mardell Stepping Down Months After Auto Brand’s Disastrous Rebrand.”
  • Evidently even the dumbest automotive channel in all YouTube can’t afford a $14,500 monthly lease-to-own payment on a Bugatti Veyron.
  • Scott of Kentucky Ballistics reviews the much-reviled Taurus Curve.
  • Things no one asked for: A muppet episode of Star Trek.
  • Speaking of Star Trek, here’s some very old school Trek content: Tom Snyder interviewing half of the original cast of Star Trek, plus Harlan Ellison.
  • Ouch! “Carnival ride breaks in half on riders in Saudi Arabia.”
  • DO NOT WANT: “Brand launches 9-volt battery-flavored chips.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Democrats Announce 2028 Campaign Slogan: ‘We Hate Capitalism, Hot Chicks, And The Jews.'”
  • “Gaza Said To Be Starving But Not ‘Release The Hostages’ Starving.”
  • “Israel Botches Genocide With Millions In Food Aid.”
  • “Cincinnati Police Chief Asks Citizens Not To Film Crimes Next Time As It Makes Her Look Bad.”
  • “Kamala Announces She Will Step Away From Politics To Spend More Time With Vodka.”
  • “Federal Judge Orders Sydney Sweeney To Gain 100 Pounds And Get One Of Those Butch Haircuts.”
  • For this week’s dose of dog, just this delightful bat-eared pooch:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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





    Has Trump Finally Killed The Train To Nowhere?

    Thursday, July 17th, 2025

    Longtime readers will remember the Texas vs. California updates I did for many years, until the bad news out of California became such a torrent that it took too long to compile them. One reoccurring feature in those posts were updates on the “high speed rail to nowhere”

    Now comes word that the Trump Administration may have finally driven a stake through its heart.

    President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy canceled the $4 billion funding meant for California’s high-speed rail train….

    The plan started 16 years ago. California has spent $15 billion but never built one high-speed track.

    Duffy’s press release noted that the “$135 billion projected total cost of the project could buy every San Francisco and LA resident nearly 200 roundtrip flights between the cities.”

    Trump wrote on Truth Social:

    To the Law abiding, Tax paying, Hardworking Citizens of the United States of America, I am thrilled to announce that I have officially freed you from funding California’s disastrously overpriced, “HIGH SPEED TRAIN TO NOWHERE.” This boondoggle, led by the incompetent Governor of California, Gavin Newscum, has cost Taxpayers Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we have received NOTHING in return except Cost Overruns. The Railroad we were promised still does not exist, and never will. This project was Severely Overpriced, Overregulated, and NEVER DELIVERED. Thanks to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, not a SINGLE penny in Federal Dollars will go towards this Newscum SCAM ever again. This was an ill-conceived and unnecessary project, and a total waste of Taxpayer money — But no more!

    Duffy started an investigation into the train in February, reviewing two grants:

  • $929 million Cooperative Agreement from 2010
  • $3.07 billion Cooperative Agreement from last year
  • In June, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) told the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) that the review “identified a trail of project delays, mismanagement, waste, and skyrocketing costs.”

    “This is California’s fault. Governor Newsom and the complicit Democrats have enabled this waste for years. Federal dollars are not a blank check – they come with a promise to deliver results. After over a decade of failures, CHSRA’s mismanagement and incompetence has proven it cannot build its train to nowhere on time or on budget,” declared Duffy. “It’s time for this boondoggle to die. President Trump and I will always fight to ensure your tax dollars only go to projects that accomplish great, big, beautiful things.”

    It became very clear, very early on that California’s high speed rail would never be built, but the one party blue state insisted on pushing on in order to continue raking off the graft and featherbedding, as well as an unshakable belief in anthropocentric global warming and a desire to take the proles out of their hated cars and pickup trucks and cram them into trains so as to better control their movements. The project should have been killed a long, long time ago.

    At least now, the only taxpayer money California’s government will be wasting is that of its own taxpayers.

    Russo-Ukrainian War Roundup For July 7, 2025

    Monday, July 7th, 2025

    A lot of Russo-Ukraine War news bubbled up last week when every other damn thing was happening, so here’s a roundup, much (but not all) from Suchomimus. Plus some bits on Russia’s economy and their continuing friction with various neighbors.

  • Multiple successful Storm Shadow strikes:

    “Storm Shadow and Ukrainian-produced cruise missiles hit a train yard in Yasynuvyata, the officer Headquarters of the 8th Guards Combined Arms Army plus drones destroy oil depot in Luhansk. Multiple impacts are seen–at least EIGHT missiles hit the train yard. Many more targeted the office headquarters. Six drones impacted the oil depot….One of Ukraine’s biggest missile strikes of the war so far.”

  • “SAM System Factory Hit By Drones in Izhevsk, Russia – Over 1,300 km From Ukraine. Liutyi drones hit the Kupol Electromechanical Plant which produces Tor and Osa SAM systems for Russia as well as drones, including Shaheds.”

  • Follow-up satellite imagery for the Izhevsk strike:

  • Another Shahed drone factory strike, this one in Sergiev Posad near Moscow.

  • Not a super significant story, but this Russian ammo dump cookoff in Khartsyzk, Donetsk is pretty epic:

  • Colombian volunteers in Sumy?

    Usual Reporting From Ukraine caveats apply.

  • Russia did manage to carry out a massive missile attack against Kiev, but as usual with Russian missile and drone attacks, it’s not clear that anything of military significance was actually hit.
  • There’s always talk that Russia’s economy is about to crack due to the strain from their illegal war of territorial aggression (as well western sanctions), but Putin recently announced that Russia would decrease defense spending next year. Given that there’s no way for Russia to recover material and equipment losses to its forces while continuing the war, he must imagine some sort of end to the conflict is near.
  • And there are some signs that, this time, it’s possible that Russia’s economy really is starting to crack.

    Russia economy meltdown as metal production plummets 23% and recession fears soar…

    The Russian economy is on the brink of recession, with several key sectors showing dwindling productivity, according to analysis. Alexander Kolyandr from the Center for European Policy Analysis took to X to explain that the country’s manufacturing sector was “losing its mojo”, even in military production.

  • More:

    “The country is in a state of stagflation,” the Centre for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (TsMAKP). “Economic dynamics are declining rapidly, and there is a risk of a technical recession in the second and third quarters, but inflation remains high.”

    It’s been less than three weeks since the central bank — supposedly independent from government control — symbolically lowered interest rates: from 21% to 20%. In doing so, it fulfilled a long-standing demand from the Kremlin. It was the first rate cut since September 2022, the year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This marked a break from a long cycle of interest rate hikes aimed at curbing rising prices.

    The situation, however, remains dire. Official inflation still hovers around 10% year-on-year, although several independent institutes estimate the real figure to be above 15%. With military spending still running wild, “risks remain skewed towards inflation,” warned Nabiullina. “Our rate cut approach requires greater caution.”

    The contradiction facing the central bank is a true reflection of the current state of the Russian economy, which has long dropped out of the world’s top 10 in terms of size. By now, even the Kremlin is beginning to acknowledge the obvious: that the economic boom driven by the war industry is coming to an end and that the savings made before the war are no longer enough.

    Maxim Oreshkin, economic advisor to the all-powerful Presidential Executive Office, declared that the emperor has no clothes just before the St. Petersburg Forum: “The model that ensured growth in recent years has largely reached its limit […] We need to advance — not forward, but upward: to the next technological and organizational level.”

  • Despite those well documented losses, Russia is now sabre rattling about Estonia hosting nuclear-weapon capable F-35 NATO aircraft. Why this is an issue when NATO-member Finland also has F-35s on order is unclear. Also unclear is how Russia thinks it could successfully invade a NATO country when it couldn’t digest Ukraine despite previously possessing considerably higher stores of Soviet-era material and equipment which it has now squandered…
  • Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan have reportedly reached agreement on a rail line through the Zangezur Corridor, a move that would cut Russia (and Iran) out entirely.
  • This follows on the heels of a falling out between Azerbaijan and Russia over Azerbaijani nationals being killed in a police raid inside Russia. “All cultural events with ties to Russia were cancelled in protest. A presenter on primetime state television denounced Moscow’s “imperial behavior” toward former Soviet states. On June 30, Azerbaijani authorities arrested two Russian journalists with Russia’s state-funded news agency Sputnik Azerbaijan in Baku. According to media reports, the two were working for the Russian domestic security service, the FSB.” More Azerbaijan arrests of Russian nationals ensued.

    This followed on the heels of the Russian shootdown of an Azerbaijani plane last year, and there’s evidently no love lost between Putin and Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev. “The Azerbaijani political scientist and member of parliament Rasim Muzabekov says Baku no longer sees Moscow as an external power in a position to dictate the rules in the Caucasus. He told DW that Azerbaijan had begun to develop its own military and energy infrastructures, and that this, in turn, had annoyed the Kremlin.” No doubt. That’s what happens when you invade much smaller nations on your periphery and get bogged down in a quagmire.

  • These are just the developments I thought worth highlighting. If you know of others, feel free to share them in the comments below.

    LinkSwarm For August 23, 2024

    Friday, August 23rd, 2024

    Both unemployment and inflation numbers in the Biden Recession are lies, the DNC finishes up as bad as everyone thought it would be, why supporting Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression in Ukraine is not a conservative position, Canada goes on strike, crappy modern art prices collapse, and Disney ships The Acolyte to a farm in the country where it can run around all day.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden’s Labor Department admits that it overcounted new jobs created by 818,000.

    For the past few days, rumors and reports have indicated that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was going to downwardly revise their assessment of the number of jobs created from April 2023 to March 2024 “by up to 1 million. This means that all ‘beats’ recorded in the past year will have been misses and the US job market is in far worse shape than the admin[istration] would admit.”

    The revision is out, and while it’s not quite a million, it’s still really darn high — 818,000 fewer jobs were created in that yearlong period than were initially reported.

    In a normal presidential campaign, where the nominee and her running mate did interviews and press conferences, this would be a major headache. Luckily, Kamala Harris and her campaign have more or less unilaterally decided she doesn’t have to do them anymore, and figures like Michael Steele, Rick Wilson, and Leslie Gray Streeter have concurred that presidential candidates answering questions in interviews are an unneeded relic of a bygone era. The candidate will tell us all we need to know or deserve to know in her stump speech.

    The president and his team want to communicate the story of successful economic management. The vice president running for her own term doesn’t have the luxury of insisting the economy is doing gangbusters and that inflation is defeated when so many Americans, looking at empty storefronts and office spaces, are concluding otherwise.

  • The other half of the Misery index, inflation, is up higher than the official rate as well:

    (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)

  • This is going to have a lot of Democrats going to Brown Alert: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Suspends Presidential Campaign, Endorses Trump.”

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “suspended” his presidential campaign Friday afternoon, explaining that he would remain on the ballot in many states to give his supporters a protest-vote option but that he would remove his name from the ballot in battleground states, where his presence might help Kamala Harris, the candidate he views as the most significant threat to his populist political project.

    Kennedy launched his quixotic run for America’s highest office after boosting his national profile during the Covid pandemic. Already a prominent vaccine skeptic and a scion of America’s most famous political dynasty, Kennedy emerged as a leader of the populist backlash against pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, writing a bestselling book, The Real Anthony Fauci, which cast the face of the federal government’s Covid response as a power-hungry bureaucrat intent on using health emergencies as a pretext to control the public.

    After making a splash through his appearances in independent media and building a following among well-heeled Silicon Valley donors, Kennedy abandoned his effort to get on the Democratic primary ballot, accusing the party of sabotaging him. Having failed to gain traction as an independent candidate and with his campaign coffers near empty, Kennedy finally announced the suspension of his campaign in an upbeat speech from Phoenix, Arizona, in which he argued that he and his supporters succeeded in shaking up America’s political establishment.

    “We proved them wrong,” Kennedy said of the those who doubted his ability to mount a campaign as an independent. “We did it because, beneath the radar of mainstream media organs, we inspired a massive political movement.”

    Kennedy went on to attack Democrats for “disenfranchising American voters” by swapping in Kamala Harris for Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, casting the party he called home for decades as a corrupt cabal of elites who carefully stage manage the political process through their influence over the media.

    “The mainstream media was once the guardian of the First Amendment and democratic principles, and it’s joined this systemic attack on democracy,” Kennedy said. “The media justifies their censorship on the grounds of combatting misinformation, but governments and oppressors don’t censor lies, they don’t fear lies, they fear the truth and that’s what they censor.”

  • The DNC just finished up and it was “a parade of horribles“:

    The DNC was a parade of horribles, displaying every form of sin, debauchery, and malign political philosophy invented by mankind—all in one room. We’ve spent the last four days being hectored by screeching harridans who demand that we reject the values that made the United States the greatest country in history and replace them with a feminist nightmare.

    • We learned that a Harris-Walz administration would put abortion on demand, for any and every reason, at the top of its priority list because, in the Democrats’ view, we are not killing enough babies in this country. They’re going to squeeze every dead baby they can out of their four years in office if they make it to the White House.
    • We also learned that they’re going to drag us into more wars and conflicts and encourage more terror attacks with their flaccid foreign policy—as they hobnob with All the Right Globalists in Davos.
    • We’ll be looking at Soviet-style price controls, unbridled socialism, and more regulations on businesses.
    • Kamala and Co. believe that the economy is just humming along, choosing to ignore runaway inflation, rampant joblessness, and the inability of many people to purchase homes, so they’ll double down on the Biden-Harris economic policies.
    • They’ll destroy children and families by encouraging mental illnesses like transgenderism, using the schools as a vehicle to spread their destructive lies about gender.
    • And speaking of schools, never forget that Kamala wants to bring back school busing in the name of equity while destroying school choice, which actually results in equity by putting educational decisions in parents’ hands. In June 2019, busing was discussed in a Democratic debate when Harris was still in the race. Afterward, her campaign confirmed that she “supported busing as a method for school integration.” And God only knows what they’ll do to homeschooling if they win in November.
    • And, of course, the border will remain wide open, with rapists, child traffickers, fentanyl pushers, and drug cartels at liberty to walk into the United States almost unimpeded.
    • Pro-lifers and peaceful protesters will continue to be locked up while violent felons roam free under a Harris-Walz administration.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Man who says he went with Tim Walz to China says he’s Maoist to the core.

    A man who says he joined Tim Walz on a trip to communist China is speaking out about his experience of traveling to the country with the future vice-presidential candidate.

    “It was almost a daily revelation of how much he adores the communist regime,” the former student told Alpha News.

    For over a decade, Tim Walz traveled to and from China. First arriving in the country in 1989, Walz taught at a high school in partnership with a nonprofit program affiliated with Harvard University. During this first trip, Walz was visiting Hong Kong when the Tiananmen Square protests began in April. Those protests ended in June when the communist government massacred protestors on June 3-4, 1989.

    After the massacre, Walz later took a train to Beijing to visit the square, according to the New York Times.

    Upon returning to the United States after that first trip, Walz told local newspapers how much he enjoyed his time in China. On June 4, 1994, Walz married Gwen Whipple on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Gwen told a local newspaper that Walz “wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The couple spent their honeymoon in China, according to local reports from the time.
    The Star Herald/Newspapers.com

    After this first trip to China, Walz founded a company that took students on summer trips to China. Walz said in a 2016 interview that he has traveled to China “about 30 times” as a teacher and member of Congress. The New York Post recently reported that Walz was a visiting fellow at a state-run university in China as recently as 2007.

    Now, a former student who says he joined Walz on a 1995 trip to China is speaking to Alpha News about the experience. That student, Shad, asked that we not use his last name.

    For several weeks, Walz and his group of students explored China together in the summer of 1995, Shad said. They saw Tiananmen Square, walked along the Great Wall of China, and traversed the country. However, the former student says he was struck by Walz’s adoration for China and its communist ideology.

    “There was no doubt he was a true believer,” Shad said. “I’ve been trying to tell people this for 30 years. Nobody wanted to listen.

    “At night, we’d go out, we’d walk the street fairs. We’d be buying souvenirs and Tim was always buying the little red book. He said he gave them as gifts … I saw him buy at least a dozen on the trip,” he said.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Democrats admit what Republicans have known all along: they want to amnesty all the illegal aliens they’ve let in the country.
  • “Congressional Democrats in tight reelection bids skip Harris, party’s nominating convention.”

    Several congressional Democrats facing tight reelection bids, particularly those in tossup or GOP-leaning states or House districts, are skipping the party’s nominating convention in Chicago this week.

    Montana Sen. Jon Tester has not yet endorsed Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, and he was the red state’s only delegate to withhold a vote backing Harris, according to Montana Public Radio.

    Instead of attending the Democratic National Convention, Tester will hold a fundraiser, farm and campaign for his reelection, according to the Montana Free Press.

    Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen told The New York Times that she would be campaigning for her reelection this week and needed to be close to her home state.

    Tester, Brown and Rosen are three of the six Senate Democrats most vulnerable to losing reelection, according the the news outlet Roll Call.

    Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, declined to join the virtual vote to nominate Harris, the Bangor Daily News reported. He also wouldn’t say who he’s voting for in November.

    Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told CNN he rarely attends conventions, but he has attended each convention during his time in Congress, according to The Hill newspaper.

    New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich told Scripps News he has commitments that conflict with the convention.

    Plus Rep Yadira Caraveo (D-CO), Rep. Val Hoyle (D-OR), Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK), and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) also skipped the convention.

  • Don Lemon asks random about the 2024 election and finds out a lot are supporting Trump.

  • Van Jones admits that anti-Jewish bigotry is “marbled” into the Democratic Party.
  • So just where is ActBlue getting all their money?

    Paging Dr. Adrienne Young, M.D.

    The good doctor is listed online as an “internist” in McKees Rocks, a borough in western Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, known locally as “the Rocks.”

    Campaign finance filings report Young’s practice is located on Heckel Road in McKees and list a 412 area code phone number. But her office does not appear to exist at this address and the number is not in service. Moreover, none of the receptionists attached to doctors’ offices located in close proximity to Young’s office address in McKees have ever heard of her. That’s peculiar in and of itself. But a search of campaign finance records only adds to the intrigue.

    Someone identified as Adrienne Young has been making substantial contributions to a left-of-center political action committee known as ActBlue, according to Federal Election Commission records.

    ActBlue was founded in 2009 to help Democratic Party candidates and allied “progressive” groups raise funds through a multiheaded hydra serving as a conduit for left-wing donors, with two more arms—ActBlue Charities and ActBlue Civics—funneling money to 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) clients, respectively.

    Restoration News is still attempting to contact the individual listed in campaign finance documents as Adrienne Young. Records list her residing on Leet Road in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. These records show that since 2017, Young has made 17,342 in contributions to ActBlue totaling $209,670.06—which averages seven contributions per day.

    However, there is no one named Adrienne Young residing at that or any other Leet Road address. Moreover, there is no one named Adrienne Young who could be described as a “mega-donor” in the same vein as say a George Soros, the source of the Open Society Foundations’ billions, or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Moreover, mega-donors do not typically make multiple transactions over an extended period of time, but instead make lump sum donations.

    To add to the confusion, one online search for Young does suggest she has more than 44 years of experience in the medical field and graduated from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in 1979. It raises a key question: Such a credentialed person should not be so difficult to find. If she’s out there, Young could be the victim of identity theft. If she’s not, then she might be a fictitious person used to pump funds into ActBlue.

    “Smurfing” involves repackaging large sums of money into smaller, individual transactions to appear less suspicious and avoid scrutiny from law enforcement officials. Is “Adrienne Young” a cover for such an operation, benefiting Democrats?

    While it is indisputably the case that ActBlue is ringing the bell with hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions, it’s not evident the smaller contributions that translate over time into larger sums are coming from an individual donor.

    One of the more recent contributions to ActBlue leading back to the donor identified as Young came on March 16, 2023, in the amount of $1196.50. That’s not an unusual amount for an individual, but what is unusual is folding that amount into more than 17,000 contributions made over the span of several years. The donor identified as Young was actively contributing to ActBlue at least through part of this year with a donation of $429.00 made on April 30, 2024. If a smurfing operation is underway, it may not be limited to what’s flowing into ActBlue.

    There were also 991 donations made in Young’s name totaling $26,481 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, 904 donations totaling $22,881.72 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and $16,190.56 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a left-of-center PAC based in Chicago.

    Once again, multiple small donations add up to large donations over time. Young is listed, for example, as making a $869 donation to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on May 12, 2019, $1,776 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee on May 23, 2024, and $800.00 to the Progressive Turnout Project on April 12, 2024. Apparently, Young has been an active donor, at least up until a few months ago.

    Allegations involving multiple donations to ActBlue that might possibly involve identify and credit card theft have caught the attention of Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares who is conducting his own investigation. The attorney general has sent a letter to ActBlue that is available on X. For its part, ActBlue has pushed back against Miyares in a statement describing the Republican attorney general’s actions as a partisan exercise.

    How expansive smurfing might be across the country isn’t certain. But the common denominator in these questionable transactions—ActBlue—certainly is.

    Restoration News has identified another potential fictional donor, Wendy Urbanowicz, residing in Vancouver, Washington. Campaign finance records show that since 2020 she has made 28,659 donations to ActBlue totaling $260,196—averaging 17 contributions per day.

    Urbanowicz supposedly made another 720 donations totaling $12,099 to the Democratic Congressional Committee; 609 donations totaling $12,365 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee; and 259 donations totaling $11,421 to Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.

    But an online search for Urbanowicz is every bit as fruitless as a search for Adrienne Young. She’s listed in FEC filings as a 73-year-old residing in Vancouver, Washington, with a 360 area code phone number. Once again, there is no record of Urbanowicz in Vancouver and the number is not active.

    It’s always possible someone is deceased or moved away. But some of the contributions listed by the FEC for Urbanowicz are as recent as May 2024. Just to cite a few examples, a donation from Urbanowicz in the amount of $2,955 was made on March 22 and a $193 donation was made on May 12.

    Not all of the FEC records pop up in an online search. This one, for instance, for ActBlue produces an error message.

    But Urbanowicz and Young are both listed as donors to the far-left PAC EMILY’s List, which backs Democrats. In these filings, Urbanowicz is listed at a P.O. Box in Vancouver with the ZIP code 98668. We’re still attempting to track down Urbanowicz, but early indications are that no one with her name resides in Vancouver or nearby.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Chicago is living down to its reputation. “Texas Delegate Robbed at Gunpoint Near Democratic Convention in Downtown Chicago.”

    A member of the Texas Democratic delegation, who arrived in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention this week, was robbed at gunpoint while walking with a friend in the city early Wednesday morning.

    The delegate’s name is unknown at this time, CWBChicago reported. The outlet said it is “not identifying him by name because he is a crime victim.” No one is in custody and detectives are still investigating the crime, the Chicago Police Department confirmed in a statement obtained by National Review.

    The victim and his friend were walking near Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago when a gunman in a ski mask pulled up in a black Range Rover and robbed them around 2 a.m. The robber stole a 25-year-old man’s wallet and hotel-room key in the same vicinity before turning his attention to the delegate and his associate. No injuries were reported in either incident.

    The prime suspects are described as two black men wearing all black clothing and ski masks. They are still believed to be at large.

    The Chicago police issued an alert warning the community about the robbers Thursday morning, saying they were linked to another robbery around the same time that the delegate and the two other victims were mugged. The pair are also responsible for two more robberies early Tuesday and Monday morning.

    Sounds like the sorts of career criminals that Democrats go out of their way to make sure remains on the streets to victimize people…

  • “D.C. Councilman Known for Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory Arrested on Bribery Charge.”

    Washington, D.C., councilman Trayon White (D.) was arrested Sunday on a bribery charge, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia announced, over allegations that he agreed to take cash payments in exchange for pressuring government employees to extend public-safety contracts with two firms.

    White, who chairs the D.C. Council’s Committee on Recreation, Libraries, and Youth Affairs and oversees the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, allegedly sought a sum of $156,000 — three percent of total contract value — for his work. In its press release, the office of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves noted that White’s alleged corruption was caught on film.

    “According to the complaint, White’s agreement with a confidential human source (the owner of the companies) — including the source’s payments to White of $35,000 in cash on four separate occasions (June 26, July 17, July 25, and August 9, 2024_ and the source showing White a document reflecting how White’s three-percent cut was calculated based on those contracts — was captured on video,” the release reads.

    Graves wrote in a statement that the time-sensitive nature of the case led his office to act quickly.

    “Because the investigation into the alleged bribery scheme involved contracts that could soon be awarded and other potential official acts that could be taken, our Office took swift steps to address the alleged crimes we were investigating,” Graves said.

    White is perhaps best known for a 2018 video he published in which he accused Jewish financiers of controlling the weather.

    “Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man,” White said. “Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation. And D.C. keep talking about ‘we a resilient city.’ And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.”

  • Another day, another potential assassination attempt against Trump.
  • Here’s a good essay on why conservatives should be on Ukraine’s side in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

    It’s time to talk to some of the bizarrely non-conservative conservatives, who for unfathomable reasons are fans of Putin’s Russia. We call these people “Brosheviks.”

    The simple background is that Kiev is far older than Moscow, and various groups controlled both territories. Ukraine was independent as a nation, then captured by the USSR. The USSR spent seventy plus years abusing and starving Ukraine to the tune of more than 30 million people. After the USSR collapsed it became independent, and the poorest country in Europe, looted and raped by its occupiers.

    Ukraine had a lot of corruption because it was a former Soviet state. They all do. It has far less corruption than Russia. Remember the Clinton Foundation washing $650 mil through Russia? And Uranium deals? Etc? That’s just the stuff we know about large scale.
    ~~
    The USSR, though, and now Russia has the greatest propaganda organ the world has ever seen. Witness:

    Literally every Russian military development—tank, aircraft, everything, led to wails of, “Oooh! The Russians have got us this time! ZOMG! State of the art! We’ll be catching up for generations! Panic! Gloom, despair, and agony on me!”

    Then we’d capture or acquire one and it would be shit tier garbage. Every fucking time. The MiG25: Shit that couldn’t dogfight or maneuver and had no loiter time. The T72: Shit armor, shit fire control, overall shit. The T90: Such shit a Bradley can take it out with 25mm. The vaunted AK47: If you’ve ever shot one you understand it’s a weapon for illiterate peasants and yes, jams like you wouldn’t believe if you haven’t handled one. That long stroke gas piston loves corrosion, debris, and mud and turns into an unergonomic club.

    The USSR persuaded the Western world, especially the left, that they were some sort of victims, not a larger, less-effective murder machine as the Nazis, but still a mass murder machine with a higher body count. Hanging a Swastika banner will get you excoriated (and should), but hang up the Hammer and Sickle, and well, we have to be tolerant of divergent viewpoints.

    We really fucking don’t. Commies are just as much subhuman shit as the Nazis. But that propaganda.

    Snip.

    “Ukraine has corruption! Vlad is saving us from the New World Order!”

    Name a single nation we’ve ever assisted in war that wasn’t corrupt. Including our own.

    Also, if you’ve paid attention the last decade (you obviously haven’t paid attention the last decade), Ukraine was in the process of flushing the corrupt leaders, most of whom were…friends of Vladimir Sputum.
    ~~
    “Ukraine has Nazis!”

    Probably a few. So does the US. So does Russia, since the head of Wagner Group, named after Hitler’s favorite composer, LITERALLY HAS SS INSIGNIA TATTOOED ON HIS CHEST, COLLARS AND SHOULDERS. Are you that fucking gullible and retarded? Apparently.

    Also, the POWs from the alleged Nazi Azov Battalion were exchanged for Russian POWs, no issue. So no (alleged) Nazis were actually stopped or tried.

    Also, those “Nazis” are taking orders from a Jewish comedian. Vlad explains this as “They’re a special kind of Nazi that isn’t necessarily anti-semitic, but still Nazis.” So, National Socialists…like yourself, Vlad?

    Snip.

    “Russia warned Ukraine not to join NATO! They can’t be aggressive like that.”

    Ukraine has not joined NATO, and your ex doesn’t get to tell you who to date.
    ~~
    “Russia is rightfully afraid of NATO aggression!”

    THIS Cold War bullshit again? Are you liberal, or retarded?
    ~~
    “Why won’t anyone stand with Russia against the New World Order? Vlad is a hero!”

    Such a hero his allies are Lil Kim in North Korea, and the Assahola in Iran. That’s who you’re supporting here, dipshit.
    ~~
    “You’re going to find out that Ukraine is carefully making it look like they’re winning! There’s this huge push in March/April 2023/2024 that’s going to end it. After Ukraine is worn out fighting Russian garbage, the A-team is going to wreck them!”

    It’s been 2.5 years. The Russian Airborne died the first day. The vaunted Spaznutz met Ukrainian reservists and got slaughtered like the shit tier, third world, all-show-and-no-dick bitches they actually are. It’s getting worse. Russians have been seen on scooters (the step on kind that populate cities like cockroaches) and Chinese golf carts. They’re losing T54s on a recurring basis, having run out of modern (1960s) tanks. It’s become a joke at this point.

    Snip.

    FACT: Russia invaded Ukraine because it wanted to seize territory it’s not entitled to, and is getting its incompetent shit tier military ass kicked by a third world nation. Even if they “win” a few counties of utter wasteland that are wrecked more than No Man’s Land in WWI, they’ve lost their credibility and military footprint for decades to come.

    Now stop being their propaganda bitch.

    Much more at the link. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Ukraine hit the only ferry working across the Kerch strait when it was loaded with fuel tanks.
  • Ukraine also hit Marinovka airbase in Volgograd, some 500km from the front lines, with drones using ball bearing warheads like on HIMARS tungsten rounds, hitting number of hangers and destroying at least three Su-34 and one Su-24 aircraft.
  • “Texas Children’s Whistleblower Fired After Alleging Child Gender Modification Medicaid Fraud.”

    Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) has fired a whistleblower following allegations that it was “unlawfully billing the state Medicaid program” for the purposes of child gender modification.

    The whistleblower, Vanessa Sivadge, provided a statement to the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo with details about how she was fired after revealing the “sex-change procedures ongoing at the hospital, but also the fraud and deception related to the illegal billing practices to Medicaid in having these procedures covered by taxpayers.”

    Sivadge stated that after her initial story went public, TCH put her “on leave.” She was then fired on Friday, August 16.

    Prior to Sivadge blowing the whistle, she stated that she submitted a religious accommodation request to transfer to another department. She said her role in the endocrinology clinic “was devastating” because her role as a nurse “primarily involved providing medication refills and working with physicians to answer questions from parents about treatment plans.”

    Sivadge added that she “would like to challenge this in court” and asked for donations for her legal defense.

    “No regrets,” wrote Sivadge on social media.

    Her story first became public back in June, following a previous TCH whistleblower, Eithan Haim, alleging that TCH had continued to provide “gender-affirming care” to minor children even after stating that it would stop doing so.

    Following Sivadge talking with Rufo, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent agents to her home to “intimidate and threaten her,” in Rufo’s words.

    Haim has been visited by agents of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and has been indicted on four felony counts of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

  • Harris County’s Lina Hidalgo still hasn’t given up on her socialist guaranteed income program, despite the Texas Supreme Court ruling it unconstitutional.

    The Harris County Commissioners Court voted along partisan lines last week to revive a guaranteed basic income (GBI) program for select residents with more restrictions and higher costs, although a previous version was halted by state courts earlier this year.

    Under the original version of the program, named Uplift Harris, the county planned to send “no-strings-attached” $500 monthly stipends to 1,928 recipients for 18 months, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit challenging the constitutionality of the program last April. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Texas (SCOTX) halted the plan indefinitely.

    Now Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo says the revised program, Uplift Harris 2.0, will provide preloaded cards with restrictions on how the funds may be spent.

    “That’s not the spirit of a guaranteed income program,” said Hidalgo. “If the state gets in the way of this and the program becomes stuck in court again then the funds will be reallocated to programs that already exist to support people living in poverty.”

    Hidalgo did not specify the restrictions on how recipients could spend funds but said the debit cards could be used for “medicine, groceries, et cetera.” The county has not yet published details of the revised GBI.

    Commissioners will cover the costs of Uplift Harris with nearly $21 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, of which $17,350,000 will be distributed to selected residents and $1 million will fund a study of the program’s effectiveness.

    Administrative costs charged by nonprofit GiveDirectly were originally $1,740,500, but under the revised GBI will rise another $400,000.

    All the better to rake off more social justice graft…

  • Both Canadian freight rail networks are hit by strikes.

  • If someone contacts you claiming to be a U.S. Marshall, but claims you need to pay your failure to appear fine in cash, then it’s a scam.

  • “Russian businesses are locked out of billions as payment issues reportedly pile up abroad.” The sanctions are leaky, but not entirely useless.
  • Why Japanese software lags so far behind western software.
  • The Baltics switch over to European electrical standards.
  • There can be only one.
  • “Google to Invest $1 Billion in Texas Data, Cloud Center Infrastructure. Google plans to make another billion-dollar investment in Texas to support data center infrastructure.” I have no respect for woke Google, but better they spend money in Texas rather than California.
  • “Warner Bros Discovery pledges $8.5 billion on Nevada Studios pending tax credit approval.” Moving production out of California makes a lot of sense, though $8.5 billion is a lot of money for a company with a market cap of $19.5 billion.
  • Follow-up: Disney backtracks on forced arbitration for wrongful death lawsuit.
  • Critical Drinker watches the new Snow White trailer. “As for the dwarfs, [these] things are absolute nightmare fuel.” And it’s amusing to see Rachel Zegler go from calling the original “dated” to calling it “beloved” is an amusing turnabout.
  • And speaking of the Drinker, he gets to dance on The Acolyte grave.

    In life you reap what you sow, and if what you sow happens to be a $180 million vanity project made by a feminist activist promoted way beyond her abilities with practically no experience, only a vague understanding of the subject matter, and even less talent for actual storytelling, starring a blank-faced charisma-vacuum with all the acting talent of a comatose Steven Seagal, and incorporating some of the most cringe-inducing scenes ever committed to film, then, well, what you reap will be a big old dose of cancel.

    More: “Man, it’s got to be a bitter pill for Kathleen Kennedy to swallow. [The Acolyte] represented her ultimate vision for Star Wars: Female focused, female led, and female directed. And, funnily enough, it was rejected by absolutely everyone.” And: “The cold, harsh truth is that the mythical ‘modern audience’ that Lucasfilm have been chasing for 10 years now simply doesn’t exist, never has existed, and never will exist.”

  • Just a bit more on The Acolyte from How it Should have Ended:

  • This just in: Crappy modern art is now bringing in 1/10th of what it was. Still outperforming NFTs, though…
  • John Richardson of the No Lawyers – Only Guns And Money blog is running for the NRA Board of Directors. Since he has done such and admirable job of covering every twist and turn of the organization’s dysfunction during the terminal years of the LaPierre regime, I can only imagine that he’ll be an excellent addition to the board.
  • Rotten Tomatoes drops the audience score to hide how much viewers actually hate woke films. Sounds like they just made their site entirely useless.
  • Kotaku social justice warrior Alyssa Mercante threatens to sue the Internet. I’m sure that will work out well for her…
  • Jeremy Clarkson bans Labour PM Keir Starmer from Clarkson’s newly opened pub.
  • Hoovie spent more than three times as much renovating his farmhouse as I spent on my entire house in 2004.
  • Woman runs over her boyfriend on the way the couples therapy.
  • The vicious claw shrimp strikes again. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • I am proud to announced that I am the Grand Prize winner in this year’s Bulwer-Lytton contest.

  • “Kamala Harris Unveils New Economic Platform ‘We Must Seize The Means Of Production And Execute The Bourgeoisie.'”
  • “David French Founds New Group ‘Evangelicals For Satan.'”
  • I’ve featured a dog bus video before, but not this particular one:

  • Still between jobs, so hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    HS2: UK’s £100 Billion Rail To Nowhere

    Thursday, October 26th, 2023

    I’ve long documented the failures of California’s still unbuilt high speed rail, and now a video from Simon Whistler (yeah, him) covers a similar doomed British high speed rail project:

  • “Even in a country used to paying absurd prices for everything from houses to a pint of beer, it was still a pretty eye-watering figure. After initially being projected to cost under £40 billion in 2012, Britain’s second high-speed rail project, HS2, was recently calculated to be facing a price tag closer to £100 billion.”
  • “Just the first phase alone the 34 miles connecting London and Birmingham is in danger of becoming one of the most expensive railways ever built.”
  • It was originally supposed to pay for itself by offering high speed connections between London and three English industrial cities in the north: Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. But ballooning costs forced the cancellation of those two line extensions.
  • “All rationale for HS2 vanished, leaving the UK with a multi-billion pound bill just to slightly reduce travel time between London and Birmingham.”
  • HS1 was the 62 mile high speed rail line from London to the channel tunnel. It only cost three times the estimated price.
  • One reason it was considered a success: “It had added significant extra capacity to commuter lines running into London from Kent, as much as 40% extra in peak times.”
  • In the dying days Gordon Brown’s Labor government in 2010, Transport Secretary and rail freak Lord Adonis published a white paper outlining his Utopian high speed rail vision for Britain. Unfortunately, incoming conservative George Osborne had a soft spot for flashy infrastructure projects.
  • “Neither Adonis nor Osborne nor anybody else could have envisaged a budget that would soon balloon wildly out of control.” Actually, I suspect anyone familiar with the many failures of high speed rail projects in the U.S. could indeed have envisaged it.
  • By 2015 it was up to £55 billion.
  • By 2019 it was £71 billion, or over £22,000 for every UK household.
  • After 2020 and Flu Manchu, it was over £100 billion, and PM Rishi Sunak pulled the plug on everything but the London to Birmingham stretch, which was still going to cost £53 billion, or £396 million per mile.
  • “The fast train from Euston Station to Birmingham New Street takes around 1 hour and 40 minutes. All H2 will do will shave 25 to 35 minutes off that.”
  • All infrastructure projects in the UK cost more than their equivalents in continental Europe. “The insane costs associated with planning applications in the UK, something that you could see in the proposed London Themes Crossing, which recently spent £267 million just on planning paperwork.”
  • There’s a ton of NIMBYism along the route, forcing them to spend billions building rail tunnels despite it being perfectly feasible to build it overland.

    Between London and Birmingham lies the sort of gentile English landscape that people who’ve never visited the UK believe the whole country looks like, a green swath of rolling hills, country lanes and posh blokes wearing tweed. Unfortunately, it turns out that the sort of people who live in this landscape hate the idea of London politicians plonking a fancy new train line right in the middle of it.

  • “Some countries like Japan can do tunneling at a reasonable cost. The UK is not among that group.”
  • Then there’s the well-paid army of white collar consultants, which will be familiar to any observer of California’s high speed rail project. “Among them were 40 employees paid more than £150,000 a year, and chief executives with higher salaries than any other public official in Britain.” Nice work if you can get it.
  • “In July of 20123 the government’s own infrastructure watchdog branded HS2 as unachievable saying it could not be delivered in its current form.”
  • The kicker: HS2 may never make it to central London, as building there is too expensive. “Rather than terminating at Euston Station in central London, HS2 would now end at Old Oak Common,” a suburban station, where they’re expected to catch local connections. “The new line will cost of tens of billions get you from Birmingham to central London less quickly than you can do it at the moment.”
  • But they’ve already spent £40 million for two top-of-the-line boring machines from Germany to dig the Old Oak Common to Euston segment. Current plans are to bury them in hope they might be used later.
  • “Hearing about stuff like this, it is tempting to wonder if, just maybe, the UK shouldn’t have listened to the results of the 2006 independent review into high speed rail written by Rod Edington before HS1 was even finished it concluded that highspeed rail simply isn’t worth it in Britain.”
  • “The money would be better spent on less sexy improvements, like line electrification and improving local bus services.”
  • And we all know why they’d never go that route: There simply aren’t enough opportunities for bureaucratic empire building and graft…

    MiniLinkSwarm for March 25, 2022

    Saturday, March 25th, 2023

    For several weeks, I’ve been running out of time to post every link I’ve gathered, so I’ve been bumping some links (generally ones that seemed less time-sensitive or required more commentary than others) to the next week’s LinkSwarm, whereupon I may use one or two, but otherwise the process repeats.

    Well, I’m just going to post all those today to clear the decks.

  • California’s leftwing Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is using his position as governor subsidize his wife’s own leftwing business empire.

    In the summer of 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom convinced the state legislature to provide $4.7 billion for K-12 mental health services, which, among other things, funded 10,000 new school counselors.

    Gavin Newsom convinced the legislature because Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of the governor, convinced him. The biggest advocate for mental health funding within the K-12 California public schools in the Newsom administration was Mrs. Newsom, according to published accounts.

    In fact, Gavin Newsom created The Office of First Partner so his wife could promote her policy agenda using taxpayer money. Since 2019, Siebel Newsom’s been armed with nearly $5 million and nine staffers within her subdivision of the governor’s office.

    Snip.

    Siebel Newsom spent years laying the ideological groundwork and political infrastructure to support her policy ambitions.

    In 2012, Siebel Newsom founded a nonprofit, The Representation Project, that licenses “gender justice” films and curricula to 5,000 schools in all 50 states. The year Gavin Newsom became governor, the California Board of Education adopted guidance that recommended her films and curriculum be licensed and used in classrooms.

    Policy making in California isn’t magic. Turns out, it’s a carefully thought through process to maximize political power and personal return from public investments.

    Last week, we investigated the sophisticated scheme through which Siebel Newsom’s film and curricula “gender justice” nonprofit, The Representation Project, leverages taxpayer dollars to promote radical ideologies, personally profit, and push the political ambitions of her husband. She brags that 2.6 million students have seen the films nationwide.

    The Representation Project contracts with her for-profit film-production company, Girls Club Entertainment. Since 2012, Siebel Newsom received $1.5 million in salary from the nonprofit. Furthermore, since 2012, the Siebel’s nonprofit paid her for-profit Girls Club $1.6 million to produce films.

    Last month, our investigation broke the story that The Representation Project was not in compliance with the California Charitable Solicitation Act. The organization was not permitted to operate or solicit donations in California most of 2022 – yet spent all last year in operation and fundraising.

    Now, we dig deeper, investigating the $4.8 million “Office of the First Partner” Gavin Newsom established for his wife’s policy work, and how Jennifer Siebel Newsom used her position to impact social and political processes, cashing checks along the way.

    n 2019, Gov. Newsom created an office for his wife as a division within the governor’s executive team. According to a press release “the First Partner and her team will focus on lifting up women and their families, breaking down barriers for our youth, and furthering the cause of gender equity in California.”

    Since inception, Siebel Newsom’s office has received nearly $4.8 million in directed taxpayer funding. The Office of First Partner has grown from seven employees with a budget of $791,000, to nine employees with a budget of $1,166,000 proposed for 2023-2024.

    Snip.

    Parents have complained about the pornographic content in Newsom’s films shown to 11-year-olds (such as an animated, upside-down stripper with tape over breasts) and 15-year-olds (nearly naked women being slapped, handcuffed, and brutalized in images taken from porn sites) — to view images, viewer discretion is advised.

    Editorials have criticized the activities in Newsom’s film The Great American Lie as “emotionally abusive.” The activities ask students to publicly reveal personal information and force commentary on their relative “privilege” and “oppression.”

    So Jennifer Siebel Newsom is using California taxpayer money to propagandize children for radical social justice and transexism.

  • An Australian comedian, YouTuber and Journalist, made videos making fun of Australian politicians and covering their oppressive Flu Manchu lockdown policies. That’s when they started trying to use the state machinery to shut him up. Then they firebombed him.

    Jordan Shanks is an Australian comedian, also know as freindlyjordies, who fell in to doing YouTube videos about Australian politicians and powerful companies over the past few years. Along the way he became a journalist, the only journalist covering some of the things being done by the government and the corporations. Then in November of 2022 his house was firebombed. It was only by chance that he wasn’t in the house at the time.

    And hey, if that sounds too dry, well you kids like Knives Out or whatever. Stick around. It’s a pretty interesting whodunit.

    Most of the Australian press is even more in the bag for the powers-that-be than the US national media is for the Democrats. There were numerous stories, all but ignored by the mainstream. One example, the Premiere of New South Wales was under investigation. That was all but ignored by the press until she resigned. Then there were the antics of her Deputy Premiere, John Barilaro.

    That is the most entertaining — or damaging to powers that be — story friendlyjordies covered.

    As a result of that coverage, the Australian anti-terrorism machinery was directed at Shanks and his employees. Of course that turned out to be a group of Keystone cops, which got their own exposure on freindlyjordies. Along the way he exposed the abuse of the anti-terrorism squad, the relationship between some of the politicians and large corporations and perhaps organized crime. Then in November of the last year, after the lawsuits failed, the anti-terrorism actions failed, and the intimidation failed, someone moved to direct action, and tried to kill him.

  • You may remember my previous post on the army selecting the M5 Next Generation Squad Weapon. So how is that going? Evidently not well.

    On all key technical measures, the Next Generation Squad Weapons program is imploding before Army’s very eyes. The program is on mechanical life support, with its progenitors at the Joint Chiefs obstinately now ramming the program through despite spectacularly failing multiple civilian-sector peer reviews almost immediately upon commercial release.

    Indeed the rifle seems cursed from birth. Even the naming has failed. Army recently allowed a third-party company to scare it off the military designation M5. The re-naming will certainly also help scupper bad public relations growing around ‘XM-5′ search results.

    Civilian testing problems have, or should have, sunk the program already. The XM-5/7 as it turns out fails a single round into a mud test. Given the platform is a piston-driven rifle it now lacks gas, as the M-16 was originally designed, to blow away debris from the eject port. Possibly aiming to avoid long-term health and safety issues associated with rifle gas, Army has selected an operating system less hardy in battlefield environments. A choice understandable in certain respects, however, in the larger scheme the decision presents potentially war-losing cost/benefit analysis.

    Civilian testing, testing Army either never did or is hiding, also only recently demonstrated that the rifle seemingly fails, at point-blank ranges, to meet its base criteria of penetrating Level 4 body armor (unassisted). True, the Army never explicitly set this goal, but it has nonetheless insinuated at every level, from media to Congress, that the rifle will penetrate said armor unassisted. Indeed, that was the entire point of the program. Of course, the rounds can penetrate body armor with Armor Piercing rounds, but so can 7.62x51mm NATO, even 5.56x45mm NATO.

    The fundamental problem with the program is there remains not enough tungsten available from China, as Army knows, to make the goal of making every round armor piercing even remotely feasible. The plan also assumes that the world’s by far largest supplier will have zero problems selling tungsten to America only for it to be shot back at its troops during World War III. Even making steel core penetrators would be exceedingly difficult when the time came, adding layers of complexity and time to the most time-contingent of human endeavors. In any case, most large bullet manufacturers and even Army pre-program have moved to tungsten penetrators for a reason, despite the fact it increases the cost by an order of magnitude and supply seems troubled. Perhaps Army has a solution, perhaps.

    The slight increase in ballistic coefficiency between the 6.8x51mm and 7.62x51mm cartridges neither justified the money pumped into the program nor does the slight increase in kinetic energy dumped on target. Itself a simple function of case pressurization within the bastardized 7.62mm case. Thus the net mechanical results of the program design-wise is a rifle still chambered in a 7.62×51 mm NATO base case (as the M-14), enjoying now two ways to charge the weapon and a folding stock. This is the limit of the touted generational design ‘leap’ under the program. And while the increased case pressure technology is very welcome the problem is, in terms of ballistics, the round is in no way a leap ahead compared to existing off-the-shelf options as those Army nearly went with under the now disavowed Interim Combat Service Rifle program, or it in fact did purchase schizophrenically just before the NGSW program began with the HK M110A1.

    The Army is evidently still moving ahead with the program.

    I can’t tell you whether the criticisms are true or not unless Sig Saur sends me a example to shoot. While that would be cool, I suspect it’s pretty unlikely, and I fear many test ranges have picayune policies against using military grade automatic weapons…

  • How Georgetown Law cracked down on Flu manchu mandate heretics.

    For questioning Covid restrictions, Georgetown Law suspended me from campus, forced me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, required me to waive my right to medical confidentiality, and threatened to report me to state bar associations.

    The Dean of Students claimed that I posed a “risk to the public health” of the University, but I quickly learned that my crime had been heretical, not medical.

    Just before I entered Georgetown Law in August 2019, I watched The Paper Chase, a 1973 film about a first-year Harvard Law student and his experiences with a demanding professor, Charles Kingsfield.

    The movie has the standard themes of law school: teaching students how to think, challenging the premises of an argument, differentiating fact patterns to support precedent. Kingsfield’s demands represent the difficulty of law school, and the most important skill is articulate, logic-based communication. “Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself,” he scolds one student.

    “Nobody inhibits you from expressing yourself.”

    Two years later, I realized that Georgetown Law had inverted that script. The school fired a professor for commenting on differences in achievement between racial groups, slandered faculty members for deviating from university group-think, and threatened to destroy dissidents. Students banished cabinet officials from campus and demanded censorship of a tenured professor for her work defending women’s rights in Muslim-majority countries.

    Unaware of the paradigm shift, I thought it was proper to ask questions about Georgetown’s Covid policies.

    In August 2021, Georgetown Law returned to in-person learning after 17 months of virtual learning. The school announced a series of new policies for the school year: there was a vaccine requirement (later to be supplemented with booster mandates), students were required to wear masks on campus, and drinking water was banned in the classroom.

    Dean Bill Treanor announced a new anonymous hotline called “Law Compliance” for community members to report dissidents who dared to quench their thirst or free their vaccinated nostrils.

    Meanwhile, faculty members were exempt from the requirement, though the school never explained what factors caused their heightened powers of immunity.

    Shortly thereafter, I received a notification from “Law Compliance” that I had been “identified as non-compliant” for “letting the mask fall beneath [my] nose.” I had a meeting with Dean of Students Mitch Bailin to discuss my insubordination, and I tried to voice my concerns about the irrationality of the school’s policies.

    He had no answers to my simple questions but assured me that he “understood my frustration.” Then, he encouraged me to “get involved in the conversation,” telling me there was a Student Bar Association meeting set to take place the following Wednesday.

    I arrived at the meeting with curiosity. I had no interest in banging my fists and causing a commotion; I just wanted to know the reasoning – the “rational basis” that law schools so often discuss – behind our school’s policies. There were four simple questions:

  • What was the goal of the school’s Covid policy? (Zero Covid? Flatten the curve?)
  • What was the limiting principle to that goal? (What were the tradeoffs?)
  • What metrics would the community need to reach for the school to remove its mask mandate?
  • How can you explain the contradictions in your policies? For example, how could the virus be so dangerous that we could not take a sip of water but safe enough that we were required to be present? Why are faculty exempt from masking requirements?
  • I feared there were simple answers to my questions that I had overlooked: these administrators made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, surely they must have had some reasoning behind their draconian measures. Right? The contradictions appeared obvious to me. The data seemed to be clear, but maybe there was an explanation.

    I delivered the brief speech without a mask, standing fifteen feet away from the nearest person. I awaited a response to my questions, but I realized this wasn’t about facts or data, premises or conclusions. This was about power and image.

    Arbitrary. Irrational. Capricious. Students learn in their first days of their legal education to invoke these words to challenge unfavored laws and policies. I figured that I was doing the same, and I thought the school would welcome a calm, albeit defiant, student asking the questions rather than loud and angry crowds.

    But this assumption turned out to be an incorrect premise. Nobody cared about my points regarding rationality – they cared that I had been reading from the wrong script. Even worse, not wearing a mask had been a more objectionable wardrobe malfunction than Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Scrapped Railway Project Could Derail Putin’s Arctic Ambitions.

    Moscow’s ability to develop its own resource-based economy, expand the Northern Sea Route, cement ties with China and support Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to project power into the Arctic depends on the development of land-based infrastructure in the northern regions of the Russian Federation…

    Yet, that ability has now been called into question, as the Russian government has canceled, despite Putin’s repeated orders to the contrary, a program to complete the broad-gauge Northern Broad-Gauge Railway. The route was intended to link settlements that support the Northern Sea Route, military bases and the locations of key sources of raw materials across the Russian North with the rest of the country…

    Snip.

    What appears to be this project’s death knell, at least for the time being, is instructive in its own right. It occurred not with some dramatic single action by the Kremlin but in a rolling fashion as has often been the case with the backtracking of decisions under Putin. In April 2021, to much acclaim, the Russian president called for construction of the Northern Broad-Gauge Railway to begin, with the goal of completing the project in the next few years. Yet, despite Putin’s words, nothing happened, at least in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased spending for his war against Ukraine and the impact of Western sanctions. Then, in 2022, Putin issued a new order for the project to go ahead. Again, nothing happened. Instead, less than a month later, Marat Khusnullin, a Russian deputy prime minister, quietly stopped all work on the project without giving anyone reason to think it would be resumed. Indeed, many Russian experts and commentators concerned with infrastructure issues believe that this railway plan has come to the end of its line, and one has even suggested that the cancellation of this project puts “a cross on the future of Russia.

    Russia was broke before it launched its illegal war of territorial aggression against the Ukraine. Now it’s even more broke.

  • Turns out I got through all but one…

    A Perfect Storm Of Transportation Disaster?

    Thursday, October 20th, 2022

    Thanks to the SuperGenius policies of the Biden Administration (plus a touch of bad weather), all three of the primary methods by which goods are transported around the nation are under near-term threat:

  • Rail: Railroad ship a huge percentage of bulk commodities (wheat, coal, etc.), and provide the backbone of U.S. agricultural and industrial transport. But railroads are under threat of disruption due to union labor difficulties the Biden Administration has been unable to resolve.

    A union representing about 12,000 rail workers on Monday voted down a tentative contract that was brokered by the White House last month ahead of a possible rail strike.

    This vote will force the two sides back to the negotiating table and creates the possibility of a nationwide strike. The potential work stoppage could paralyze the nation’s supply chain and transportation rail service later this fall as the U.S. enters peak holiday season.

    Four unions have ratified contracts based on the agreement brokered by the White House, while seven have votes pending on the deal. The eleven unions represent about 115,000 rail workers.

    The two largest rail unions — the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Trainmen, or BLET, and the SMART Transportation Division, or SMART-TD, which make up roughly half of all rail workers — are set to finish voting in the middle of next month.

    The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division of the Teamsters, or BMWED, rejected the tentative contract due to frustration with compensation and working conditions, particularly a lack of paid sick days, BMWED President Tony Cardell said in a statement on Monday.

    The Biden proposal and was widely viewed as a cynical way to delay any rail strike until after midterm elections. That means that most of the wheat harvest will be in, but most corn will still need to be transported. And corn is the largest agricultural commodity shipped by rail.

  • Long-Haul Trucking. Well, if you can’t ship via rail, at least you can ship in an 18-wheeler, right? The problem is that the overwhelming majority of 18-wheelers use diesel, and diesel is in short supply.

    The crisis gripping the US diesel market is getting out of hand, as demand is surging while supplies remain at the lowest seasonal level for this time of year ever, according to government data released Wednesday.

    According to the EIA, the US now has just 25 days of diesel supply, the lowest since 2008; and while inventories are record low, the four-week rolling average of distillates supplied – a proxy for demand – rose to its highest seasonal level since 2007.

    In short, record low supply (courtesy of stifling regulations that have led to a historic shortage of refining capacity) meet record high demand. What comes next is, well, ugly (while weekly demand dipped slightly in the latest week, it’s still at highest point in two years amid higher trucking, farming and heating use).

    The shortage of the fuel used for heating and trucking and – generally speaking – to keep commerce and freight running, has become a key worry for the Biden administration heading into winter, perhaps even bigger than the price of gas heading into the midterms (well, not really). As Bloomberg’s Javier Blas writes, “such low levels are alarming because diesel is the workhorse of the global economy. It powers trucks and vans, excavators, freight trains and ships. A shortage would mean higher costs for everything from trucking to farming to construction.”

    National Economic Council Director Brian Deese told Bloomberg TV Wednesday that that diesel inventories are “unacceptably low” and “all options are on the table” to build supplies and reduce retail prices.

    But while the White House claims to be so very concerned about the coming diesel crisis, it is doing absolutely nothing besides draining the SPR which has zero impact on diesel production.

    The historic diesel crunch comes just weeks ahead of the midterm elections and will almost certainly drive up prices for consumers who already view inflation and the economy as a top voting issue. Retail prices have been steadily climbing for more than two weeks. At $5.324 a gallon, they’re 50% higher than this time last year, according to AAA data.

    For those who might naively suggest “Well, oil refineries should just produce more diesel and less gasoline,” it doesn’t work that way. Though they sit side-by-side in gas pumps, the two fuels come from different points in the fractional distillation column, with Naphtha and Kerosene between them. You can’t just turn a knob to make more of one and less of the other.

    The diesel shortage is a direct result of of Democrats refusing to let new refineries be built.

  • Barge Transport. Well, if you can’t ship by rail or truck, at least you ship by barge? Not necessarily. The Mississippi River is hitting some of its lowest water levels in recorded history, resulting in parts of the river being closed to barge traffic.

    Drought closed a portion of the Mississippi River earlier this week, as the major waterway has been an absolute nightmare for tugboat captains to navigate.

    A stretch of the Mississippi River just northeast of Memphis, near Hickman, Kentucky, was closed on Monday because water levels reached record low levels. This caused a logjam of vessels and barges. And it’s the third time a portion of the river has been shuttered in weeks.

    We’ve reported dangerously low water levels have left farmers with a barge shortage as freight rates hyperinflate. Some farmers have piled up beans and other crops as logistical pipelines to transport farm goods from the Heartland by barge to export terminals in the US Gulf Coast are paralyzed due to extraordinary conditions on the Mississippi.

    Ag blog Delta Farm Press’ senior staff writer Ginger Rowsey spoke with barge captain Eric Badeaux who said it usually takes him 1-2 days to move barges from Morris, Illinois, down the Illinois River to the Mississippi River and on to New Orleans. He’s got over four decades of navigating cargo on the waterways and said because of drought and obstacles, it now takes 8-10 days for the same distance.

    “We had been on the boat two weeks and had not even made it to Memphis yet,” Badeaux said. At one point, Badeaux and his crew only traveled 60 miles in four days. They typically average 200 miles per day when heading south.

    “In one day, we burned 2,367 gallons of diesel fuel, just sitting here fighting the current,” Badeaux said. “That comes out to about $10,000 in fuel for one day, and we barely moved. Multiply the fuel costs for all of the boats just sitting here, plus all the other costs involved in boat maintenance and you can see why transportation costs are through the roof. It’s disastrous.”

    On a recent trip, Rowsey said that Badeaux pulled 20 barges of corn, soybeans, and coiled steel down the river, along with ten empty barges. He said the rapidly dropping water levels make the waterway risky to haul more barges. An average tow usually consists of 30-40 full barges.

  • There’s no guarantee that all three segments of transportation will hit crisis status at all, much less at the same time. A good bout of rain across the Midwest could ease Mississippi drought conditions. A last minute labor agreement could be reached, avoiding any strikes. And low diesel supplies don’t mean no diesel supplies.

    But if all three do hit crisis proportions in late November or early December, it’s quite likely that the holidays will be far from happy…

    Ukraine Hits Train On Crimean Bridge

    Saturday, October 8th, 2022

    Ukraine manages to nail a Russian train laden with war materials as it was transiting the Kerch Strait Bridge.

    A massive fire is burning on the Kirch Strait Bridge that connects Russia to Crimea Saturday morning, with images showing multiple train cars fully engulfed and two spans of the road bridge in the water.

    Traffic on the bridge, a critical strategic artery for Russian forces in Crimea amid its war in Ukraine, has reportedly been halted as heavy flames and black smoke spew from a train carrying unknown cargo. Photos also show spans of both east and westbound lanes have collapsed into the water near the burning train.

    Yeah, it looks bad:

    Those collapsed spans are potentially a huge blow to Russia’s entire war effort, as they were already having difficulties keeping all of their field units adequately supplied. With the Kerch Strait Bridge out of commission, the job of resupplying the southern front goes from being difficult to being an absolute nightmare, and makes Melitopol even more vital to keeping troops on the southern flank supplied.

    The bridge cost billions to build after Russia seized Crimea in 2014 and has been one of Ukraine’s top targets, although it lacked traditional weaponry capable of striking it from far away. Even the Pentagon has openly stated that it sees the bridge as a viable target for Ukrainian forces. Russia has deployed air defenses and decoy barges in an attempt to protect it from some kind of attack in recent months.

    It’s hard for even a competent military to have effective air defense all along possible logistics routes, and Russia has been far from a competent military in this war.

    Suchomimus is on it:

    He maps it as too far for HIMARS, and thinks it was likely a drone attack.

    Russia has a 30,000 man strong rail organization. If it hasn’t suffered the same rot as the rest of the Russian armed forces (a big if), and if they can scrounge up the proper equipment (such as a crane barge; another big if), it could conceivably have the bridge repaired and usable again, possibly in as little as two to four weeks. It’s not easy, but it’s doable, and I imagine this is going to automatically jump to the top priority on the Russian logistics list. And, unlike the Antonovsky Bridge, it’s not currently in HIMARS range.

    But given the gross incompetence Russia’s military has shown in so many areas, it’s no sure bet that it can be repaired that quickly (or even at all) with assets in or near the theater.

    The clock is ticking…

    Update: Now reading that it was a truck bomb that took it out, timed to hit a passing fuel train, and that certainly seems plausible from fiercely the train was burning.