One wonders if Vladimir Putin knew that not only would his three day “special military operation” in Ukraine drag on for at least two and a half years, but that Ukraine would launch a successful invasion of Kursk oblast, if he might have reconsidered ordering it.
Ukraine’s Kursk incursion continues to take territory in Russia.
A lot of observers (myself included) were puzzled by what endgame Ukraine is seeking in Kursk. So here are a couple of theories.
Peter Zeihan thinks the invasion is to cut off supplies to the city of Belgorod (one of the two major logistical hubs for Russia’s war effort).
“No one invades Russia on a whim.”
“The problem that the Russians have always had expanding for Moscow is that there’s no logical place to stop that’s within a thousand miles of them. So they expand, they conquer some minorities, they occupy them, they try to Russify them, they turn them to cannon fodder, and they throw them in the next line of minorities. They continue this process over and over and over and over and over until they eventually reach a geographic barrier that they can actually hunker down behind.”
“It works until it doesn’t. And what we’re seeing with Russia right now is that the demographic decline among the Russian ethnicity is so high that within a few years they’re going to be having problems occupying their own populations.”
“The incursion that the Ukrainians have made into Russia proper isn’t all that impressive from a territorial point of view. Basically in the last two weeks the Ukrainians have invaded Russia proper. They’ve taken over about a thousand square kilometers in the province of Kursk. And the question is why, and what is next.”
“They have already destroyed the three permanent bridges over the river Seym, which is a east-west river that cuts through Kursk province, and by doing that they’ve made it very difficult for the Russians to reinforce the territories around where this incursion has been.”
“The Ukrainians are currently expanding on at least four different axes, northwest, northeast, north and east, and in doing so they’re basically looking to swallow, at least temporarily, about half the province, about 6,000 square mile.”
“The thousand square kilometers that the Ukrainians have captured so far is greater than the entirety of what the Russian army has achieved in the Donbas in the last 18 months.”
Ukraine has taken out all the bridges, leaving Russians to use pontoon bridges for resupply, which are much more easily destroyed. And, as Suchomimus has shown in his recent videos, they seem to be rebuilding those bridges in the same spots, presumably because they’re the only suitable spots for building them, making it that much easier to take them out.
“I have always identified the city of Belgorad as one of the cities that the Ukrainians have to neutralize if they’re ever going to win this war, because it’s the tip of the spear for Russian forces. This is where, in the northern theater, all of their armies and all of their artillery are concentrated, because it’s at the end of the logistical lines. It’s a big rail and road hub. Well, if the Ukrainians are capable of basically taking the southern half of Kursk province, they take out most of the infrastructure that feeds into Belgorad.” Maybe, but there’s a whole lot of territory to take before Belgorad gets cut off.
“This took the Ukrainians scraping up the last of their reserve units, along with some advanced units that were training with NATO for future operations. I don’t think they’ve got a very deep bench beyond this.”
Invading here has allowed Ukraine to outflank Russia’s deep system of trenches, minefields and artillery. “The Ukrainians have been able to basically locate a battlefield that plays to their strengths rather than the Russian strengths and they’re kicking some serious ass.”
“The problem is they just don’t probably have enough men to fully take advantage of it, but neither do the Russians have the men necessary to eject the Ukrainians. Russia is also nearing the end of what they can scrape up through conscription of ethnic minorities. “The cupboard is getting dry.” They’re also extremely low on capable leadership (such as it is). Putin “just assigned one of his former bodyguards to run the operation in Kursk, and you can imagine how well that’s going.”
“What we’ve seen them do in the last two weeks is basically mobilize every military force that they have left in the country, which is not a lot.”
“They haven’t been able to find the 30,000 to 70,000 troops that they need in order to retake Kursk, and with the bridges gone they can only approach from the east, so the Ukrainians are having a bit of a heyday at the moment.”
The biggest fallout of the Kursk incursion is a dog that didn’t bark. “Nukes haven’t flown. Throughout this war, the Russians have, at every stage, identified a series of red lines, saying that if you cross this line we’re going to nuke Washington and Warsaw, Berlin and Paris and London and the rest, and at every stage it’s turned out to be a bluff. Well, now the Ukrainians have crossed the international border in force. They have castrated the Russian military in the area.”
“The Russians are showing an inability or an unwillingness to go to that level, and that tells me that the conservatism in Western capitals about challenging the Russians is about to evaporate. Because if the Ukrainians can do this without that sort of counter reaction, then pretty much every Russian threat to this point is meaningless.”
Next up: The Russian Dude, an anti-Putin and anti-Ukrainian War YouTuber who fled Russia just as the first conscription orders were coming down. He thinks the Kursk invasion may be a way to force Putin into calling up a second general conscription, something he has been loath to do since the first was so unpopular.
“The initial reaction to Ukraine’s move into Kursk was mixed. Many, especially those in the Russian military establishment, dismissed it as a mere PR stunt or a psychological operation, a distraction intended to draw attention away from other fronts. But as the days progressed, it became clear that this was no mere show of force. The Ukrainian Army was committed, and their objectives were far more strategic than anyone had anticipated.”
Even “Z propagandists” in Russia are admitting that ejecting Ukraine from Kursk oblast will take time. “This was a wakeup call. The country’s military and political leaders had long been accustomed to dismissing Ukrainian operations as inconsequential. The belief was that Russia’s superior military power would always be enough to repel any significant threat. But the events unfolding in Kirsk challenged this assumption.” Even some of the most pro-war Russian milbloggers began to express doubts.
“Russian president Vladimir Putin is facing a very scary decision. For years Putin has positioned himself as a strongman, a leader who would stop at nothing to achieve his goals. But the events in Kursk revealed the limits of his power. The Russian military, once his unstoppable force, was now struggling to respond to a determined and well-coordinated Ukrainian offensive.”
“Putin’s dilemma is rooted in the fact that he has few good options left. The Russian military is stretched thin, its resources depleted by years of sustaining conflict the invasion of Ukraine, which was supposed to be a quick and decisive victory, has instead turned to a grinding war of attrition. And now, with the Ukrainian forces pushing into Russian territory, the weaknesses of the Russian military are becoming more apparent than ever.”
“One of the key indicators of this is the absence of a new mobilization effort, despite the heavy losses Russia has suffered. Putin has not ordered a new wave of conscription [because] another round of mobilization would likely would like destabilize his regime. The last call-up in 2022 was deeply unpopular, sparking protest and unrest across the country.”
“Many Russians who had previously been indifferent to the war suddenly found themselves directly affected and the backlash was significant. Putin knows that another mobilization would likely provoke a similar response, potentially undermining his hold on power, but without new recruits the Russian military is running out of manpower.”
“Russia’s defense industry is struggling to keep up with the demands of the war. Missiles fired at Ukrainian cities bare markings from 2023 and 2024, indicating that they were produced recently. This suggests that Russia has managed to bypass some of the sanctions imposed by the West to acquire the components needed to build these weapons. But it also means that there is no surplus. Every single missile produced is immediately sent to the battlefield. The same is true for other military equipment like tanks, drones, and ammunition.”
Everyone who could be tempted by a sign-up bonus has already joined, even though they keep increasing. “If you do announce another round of mobilization and start grabbing people from the streets and sending them to fight in Ukraine for free, well, I don’t think that’s going to sit well with these people.”
“While Russia grapples with these challenges, Ukraine’s western allies have been surprisingly quiet, in a good way.”
“This raises the question: Have they finally realized that Putin’s ability to escalate the war further is limited? The answer appears to be yes. After nearly two years of watching Russia’s military strategy unfold, it seems that western powers have concluded that Putin is already operating at his maximum capacity.”
“Now Western leaders seem more willing to allow Ukraine to use the weapons as it sees fit. The focus has shifted from preventing escalation to supporting Ukraine in its efforts to defend itself and reclaim its territory.”
“Ukraine is now receiving more advanced technology, including long-range missiles and sophisticated drones. These weapons are designed to not just defend against Russian attacks, but to strike deeper inside Russian-held territory, disrupting supply lines and targeting key military objects.”
Thus far Putin has avoided seriously conscripting soldiers from the only two areas of the country he cares about: Moscow and St. Petersburg. Ukraine’s Kursk gambit may force him into doing so, possibly triggering his downfall.
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.
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:
🚨🚨Since Kamala Harris took office:
📈Eggs are UP 46.8%. 📈Peanut butter is UP 42.8%. 📈Crackers are UP 40.3%. 📈Baby food and formula are UP 30.1%. 📈 Inflation has skyrocketed by OVER 20%, 📈Delivery services are UP 29.7%. #KamalaCosts#Kamalanomics
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.”
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.
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 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.
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…
“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.
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.
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.
Remember how Donald Trump was ahead in several states election night only for tons of Biden ballots to be “found” at 4 AM? I hope all Republican officials in every state are working overtime to prevent similar occurrences this November.
Texas Attorney Ken Paxton seems to be taking nothing for granted, as the Elections Integrity Unit just executed several warrants.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced that his office had carried out search operations as part of an ongoing investigation into alleged election fraud.
A statement from Paxton’s office reads, “On August 20, 2024, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit executed multiple search warrants in Frio, Atascosa, and Bexar Counties as part of an ongoing election integrity investigation.”
Bexar County is the big one here, being home to San Antonio, whereas Atascosa and Frio are directly south and southwest of San Antonio. The geographic clustering suggests the warrants may all be part of the same election fraud case.
These searches are the result of a 2022 referral by 81st Judicial District Attorney Audrey Louis, who flagged concerns about alleged voter fraud and ballot harvesting in the 2022 elections.
“Secure elections are the cornerstone of our republic,” Paxton said. “We were glad to assist when the District Attorney referred this case to my office for investigation. We are completely committed to protecting the security of the ballot box and the integrity of every legal vote. This means ensuring accountability for anyone committing election crimes.”
Paxton’s involvement in this case is made possible only through the referral by the local District Attorney. This follows a December 2021 ruling by the Court of Criminal Appeals—Texas’ highest court on criminal matters—that declared a state law granting the attorney general unilateral authority to prosecute election cases unconstitutional. The court argued that the Texas Constitution does not expressly provide the attorney general with such authority.
Following reports of organizations potentially working in Texas to register illegal aliens to vote, Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced his office is launching an investigation.
According to a release from Paxton’s office:
Investigators from the Texas Attorney General’s Election Integrity Unit recently conducted undercover operations to identify potential voter registration of noncitizens in Texas. The investigation has already confirmed that various nonprofit organizations have been located outside Texas Department of Public Safety Driver License offices, operating booths offering to assist in voter registration for persons doing business at the driver’s license offices. But all citizens have already been presented an opportunity to register to vote as part of the process of renewing or being issued an identification card or driver’s license, so there is no obvious need to assist citizens to register to vote outside DPS offices—calling into question the motives of the nonprofit groups.
I wonder if these unnamed organizations had “justice” or “tides” in their name.
Paxton said the possibility of this activity is deeply troubling to Texans.
“If eligible citizens can legally register to vote when conducting their business at a DPS office, why would they need a second opportunity to register with a booth outside? My office is investigating every credible report we receive regarding potential criminal activity that could compromise the integrity of our elections,” said Paxton.
“The Biden-Harris Administration has intentionally flooded our country with illegal aliens, and without proper safeguards, foreign nationals can illegally influence elections at the local, state, and national level. It is a crime to vote—or to register to vote—if you are not a United States Citizen. Any wrongdoing will be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” he added.
Gov. Greg Abbott expressed support for Paxton’s investigation on X.
Illegally registering non-citizens to vote won't be tolerated in Texas.
It's a crime.
Attorney General @KenPaxtonTX is thoroughly investigating it.
Fortunately, Texas has strong Voter ID laws that should prevent illegal aliens from voting in the 2024 election, but Paxton is obviously trying to close off all potential fraud vectors. Despite what your Facebook friends may post, Texas is in no danger of turning blue anytime soon, but voting could easily tip some down-ballot races. Best to nip it in the bud.
“Patch Tuesday” is when Microsoft (and other software companies) regularly release patches for their software on the second Tuesday of a month. A “zero day exploit” is a serious, previously undisclosed security flaw in a shipping piece of software. Not every Patch Tuesday includes a zero day fix, and sometimes the release only fixes one or two.
Attackers are actively exploiting as many as six of the 90 vulnerabilities that Microsoft disclosed in its security update for August, making them a top priority for administrators this Patch Tuesday.
Another four CVEs in Microsoft’s update were publicly known before the Aug. 13 disclosure, which also make them zero-days of a sort, even though attackers have not yet begun exploiting them. Among them, an elevation of privilege (EoP) bug in Windows Update Stack, tracked as CVE-2024-38202, is particularly troubling because Microsoft does not yet have a patch for it.
The unpatched flaw allows an attacker with “basic user privileges to reintroduce previously mitigated vulnerabilities or circumvent some features of Virtualization Based Security (VBS),” according to Microsoft. The company has assessed the bug as being only of moderate severity because an attacker would need to trick an administrator or user with delegated permissions into performing a system restore.
However, Scott Caveza, staff research engineer at Tenable, says that if an attacker were to chain CVE-2024-38202 with CVE-2024-21302 (an EoP flaw in the current update that affects Windows Secure Kernel), they would be able to roll back software updates without the need for any interaction with a privileged user. “CVE-2024-38202 does require ‘additional interaction by a privileged user,’ according to Microsoft,” he says. “However, the chaining of CVE-2024-21302 allows an attacker to downgrade or roll back software versions without the need for interaction from a victim with elevated privileges.”
Caveza says each vulnerability can be exploited separately, but when combined, they could potentially have a more significant impact.
In all, seven of the bugs that Microsoft disclosed this week are rated as critical. The company rated 79 CVEs — including the zero-days that attackers are actively exploiting — as “Important,” or of medium severity, because they involve some level of user interaction or other requirement for an attacker to exploit. “While this isn’t the biggest release, it is unusual to see so many bugs listed as public or under active attack in a single release,” said Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), in a blog post.
This is, to use a technical term, “bad.”
I’m not an expert in Windows security, but ten zero day exploits sounds like a new record.
And just who is exploiting this vulnerability in the wild? Well, in one case, North Korea.
A Windows zero-day vulnerability recently patched by Microsoft was exploited by hackers working on behalf of the North Korean government so they could install custom malware that’s exceptionally stealthy and advanced, researchers reported Monday.
Getting pwned by North Korea is like getting arrested for knocking over a liquor store because you posted a picture of yourself in front of the store holding up the stolen cash on Facebook.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38193, was one of six zero-days—meaning vulnerabilities known or actively exploited before the vendor has a patch—fixed in Microsoft’s monthly update release last Tuesday. Microsoft said the vulnerability—in a class known as a “use after free”—was located in AFD.sys, the binary file for what’s known as the ancillary function driver and the kernel entry point for the Winsock API. Microsoft warned that the zero-day could be exploited to give attackers system privileges, the maximum system rights available in Windows and a required status for executing untrusted code.
Microsoft warned at the time that the vulnerability was being actively exploited but provided no details about who was behind the attacks or what their ultimate objective was. On Monday, researchers with Gen—the security firm that discovered the attacks and reported them privately to Microsoft—said the threat actors were part of Lazarus, the name researchers use to track a hacking outfit backed by the North Korean government.
“The vulnerability allowed attackers to bypass normal security restrictions and access sensitive system areas that most users and administrators can’t reach,” Gen researchers reported. “This type of attack is both sophisticated and resourceful, potentially costing several hundred thousand dollars on the black market. This is concerning because it targets individuals in sensitive fields, such as those working in cryptocurrency engineering or aerospace to get access to their employer’s networks and steal cryptocurrencies to fund attackers’ operations.”
Monday’s blog post said that Lazarus was using the exploit to install FudModule, a sophisticated piece of malware discovered and analyzed in 2022 by researchers from two separate security firms: AhnLab and ESET. Named after the FudModule.dll file that once was present in its export table, FudModule is a type of malware known as a rootkit. It stood out for its ability to operate robustly in the deep in the innermost recess of Windows, a realm that wasn’t widely understood then or now. That capability allowed FudModule to disable monitoring by both internal and external security defenses.
Rootkits are pieces of malware that have the ability to hide their files, processes, and other inner workings from the operating system itself and, at the same time, control the deepest levels of the operating system. To work, rootkits must first gain system privileges and go on to directly interact with the kernel, the area of an operating system reserved for the most sensitive functions. The FudModule variants discovered by AhnLabs and ESET were installed using a technique called “bring your own vulnerable driver,” which involves installing a legitimate driver with known vulnerabilities to gain access to the kernel.
Earlier this year, researchers from security firm Avast spotted a newer FudModule variant that bypassed key Windows defenses such as Endpoint Detection and Response, and Protected Process Light. Microsoft took six months after Avast privately reported the vulnerability to fix it, a delay that allowed Lazarus to continue exploiting it.
Whereas Lazarus used “bring your own vulnerable driver” to install earlier versions of FudModule, group members installed the variant discovered by Avast by exploiting a bug in appid.sys, a driver enabling the Windows AppLocker service, which comes preinstalled in Windows. Avast researchers said at the time the Windows vulnerability exploited in those attacks represented a holy grail for hackers because it was baked directly into the OS rather than having to be installed from third-party sources.
As I’ve noted before, Internet security is hard. Neither Mac nor Linux are entirely free of such exploits, but they seem to be a lot less frequent. Log4J wasn’t a Linux kernel exploit, but everyone (rightly) freaked out over it because Log4j was used everywhere and it let attackers install malicious code on your server.
Microsoft patching ten zero day exploits suggests that there’s a big problem up in Redmond. You would think the zero day vulnerability numbers would be going down, not up. I wonder if we might be seeing that start of widespread AI use to find vulnerabilities in software.
On Joe Rogan, Peter Thiel has an interesting answer to conservatives wondering why California hasn’t collapsed already: California is essentially Saudi Arabia.
Joe Rogan: “California just jacked their taxes up to 14[% at the highest marginal rate], what was it, 14.4[%]?”
Peter Thiel: Something like that, yeah. 14.3[%] I think.”
JR: “You want more money for doing a terrible job, and having more people leave for the first time ever.”
PT: “But it gets away with it.”
JR: “I know! People are forced with no choice. What are you going to do?”
PT: “There are people at the margins who leave, but the state government still collects more and more in revenues. You get 10% more revenues and 5% of the people leave you still increase the amount of revenues you’re getting. It’s inelastic enough that you’re actually able to increase the revenues.”
PT: “This is sort of the the crazy thing about California. There’s always sort of a right-wing or libertarian critique of California that it’s such a ridiculous place, it should just collapse under its own ridiculousness and it doesn’t quite happen.”
PT: “The macroeconomics in it are are pretty good. 40 million people, the GDP is around 4 trillion. It’s about the same as Germany with 80 million, or Japan with 125 million. Japan has three times the population of California same GDP means one-third the per capita GDP, so there’s some level on which California as a whole is working, even though it doesn’t work from a governance point of view.”
PT: “The rough model I have for how to think of California is that it’s kind of like Saudi Arabia. They have a crazy religion, wokeism in California, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. You know not that many people believe it, but it it distorts everything.”
PT: “Then you have like oil fields in Saudi Arabia and you have the big tech companies in California, and the oil pays for everything.”
PT: “Then you have a completely bloated, inefficient government sector, and you have sort of all sorts of distortions in the real estate market where people also make lots of money, and sort of the government and real estate are ways you redistribute the oil wealth. And that’s the big tech money in California.”
PT: “It’s not the way you might want to design a system from scratch, but it’s pretty stable. People have been saying Saudi Arabia is ridiculous, it’s going to collapse any year now. They’ve been saying that for 40 or 50 years. But you know, if you have a giant oil field you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness.”
PT: “I think that’s the way you have to think of California. There’s things about it that are ridiculous, but there’s something about it. It doesn’t naturally self-destruct overnight.”
JR: “There’s a lot of people that are still generating enormous amounts of wealth there, and it’s too difficult to just pack up and leave.”
PT: “I think it’s something like four of the eight or nine companies with market capitalizations over a trillion dollars are based in California: Google, Apple, now Nvidia, Meta…I think Broadcom is close to that.”
Thiel also points out the great weather, and notes that there’s no large enough city in a zero income tax state tempting enough (at least for him) to move to. Austin he dismisses because “Austin’s a government town and a college town and a wannabe hipster San Francisco town, so in my books, three and you’re kind of out.”
Of course, the big difference between Apple, Nvidia, etc., and Saudi Aramco, is that all those tech companies could still move to another state, as Elon Musk proved by moving much of Tesla and SpaceX to Texas. But that oil isn’t going anywhere until the Saudis (or the western companies they hire) pump it out.
Also, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudis have sidelined the Wahhabist clerics, so that the state religion is moving (if slowly) in a more modern direction.
Alas, since the pact between Muhammad bin Saud and Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab dates back to about 1745, this metaphor suggests that wokeism still has a quarter millennium to run.
Let’s hope that the poisoned cult of social justice has a much shorter stretch until its richly deserved demise.
Chicago business owners, reeling since the lootings and vandalism that occurred during the 2020 civil uprisings, are taking no chances with the thousands of anti-Israel activists who are set to arrive at the Windy City’s downtown area this week to “shut down the DNC for Gaza.”
Although the Democratic National Convention is set to kick off Monday, business owners in the downtown area have already taken measures to protect their stores from belligerent rioters, boarding up their windows and barricading their doors. By Thursday, several storefronts had been shielded by plywood, local media outlets reported.
“As we know, this city has a poor track record when it comes to protecting businesses,” a local store owner, Scott Shapiro, told ABC Chicago. “We felt it was more prudent to board up, since our customers and their employers have told them to stay home throughout the convention for their own safety.”
Mr. Shapiro’s menswear shop on Clark Street, Syd Jerome, nearly went out of business four years ago after it was repeatedly ransacked and lost nearly $100,000 in merchandise. His shop was just one of the businesses that suffered from repeated break-ins during the George Floyd protests that took hold of Chicago in summer 2020.
Gee, do you think it’s possibly that all those “pro-Palestinian” protesters descending on Chicago just might want to loot and torch a shop run by someone who’s last name is “Shapiro”?
The owner of Chicago Board-Up Services, Vicki Fichter, said her crew has already worked on more than a dozen businesses in the past week and she has received more than 40 requests for board-up jobs in the downtown area.
“We’re boarding them up tight, so that there’s no entry,” Ms. Fichter told ABC.
Sounds like Chicago business owners know exactly what “mostly peaceful” Democratic Party activism looks like.
As the Democratic National Convention (DNC) approaches, Chicago has noticed a concerning trend that has raised alarm among residents and law enforcement. Pallets of bricks have mysteriously appeared on street corners, sparking speculation that the city could experience a new wave of organized chaos similar to other violent protests of previous years.
The presence of these bricks is not an isolated incident but a strategy with a well-known history. In the summer of 2020, similar deliveries were reported in various cities across the United States, including Minneapolis, New York, and Portland. These cities experienced protests against police brutality that turned into riots. Authorities and citizens connected these pallets of bricks to groups such as Antifa, alleging that the groups used them to arm protesters and stoke violence under the guise of legitimate demonstrations.
Worse still for Chicago, the police seem to be calling in sick. “According to some reports on social media, more than 1,000 officers are calling in sick.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
It seems that some social justice factions of the Democratic Party actively want destructive riots, even when they harm Democrats and Democrat-run cities, presumably to keep other factions in line. This time around, the riots will ostensibly be about the Israel Hamas War (which, much to the frustration of jihad-friendly social justice warriors, Israel is winning handily), but we know that even if the Middle East were enjoying a rare respite of peace, the brick hurlers would just find another reason to riot…
Yesterday I covered the Supreme Court blocking the Biden Administrations unilateral rewrite of Title IX by executive fiat to impose transexism on colleges, but that’s not the only place Democrats are trying to impose their twisted gender ideology. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issuing the Biden Administration over their attempt to impose their gender ideology in Title VII.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is once again challenging the Biden administration, filing a lawsuit against the federal government in an effort to block enforcement guidance that the state argues unlawfully compels employers to adopt “transgender” mandates under the threat of discrimination or harassment lawsuits.
Specifically, the lawsuit points to a change the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) made in April to the “enforcement guidance on harassment in the workplace” that now includes the definition of “gender identity” under the category of “sex.”
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created the EEOC to enforce the prohibitions on employment discrimination.
The EEOC guidelines explain how sex-based harassment includes harassment based on “sexual orientation or gender identity,” including misusing pronouns and “the denial of access to a bathroom… consistent with the individual’s gender identity.”
Forcing pronouns on people and making the peasants acquiesce to allowing men in women’s restrooms seems like a huge goal for the Democratic Party, one they’re been relentlessly pushing for over the last decade.
Paxton argues that the EEOC guidance “relies on an intentional misrepresentation of the Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.” He adds that the decision “did not discuss how such employers must accommodate such employees in the workplace.”
In Bostock v. Clayton County, the court ruled that firing someone for being “gay or transgender” is a form of sex discrimination, but Paxton argues that this does not extend to accommodations such as pronoun use, bathroom access, or dress codes.
“Thus,” the lawsuit states, “EEOC may not interpret Title VII to require employers to comply with the Pronoun Accommodation, the Bathroom Accommodation, or the Dress Code Accommodation.”
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the 2024 guidance unlawful, invalidate it, and permanently prevent its enforcement, as well as cover their legal costs and provide any additional relief deemed appropriate by the court.
Paxton is joined by the conservative Heritage Foundation in this legal challenge.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is attempting yet again to rewrite federal law through undemocratic and illegal agency action,” Paxton wrote in a statement.
“This time, they are unlawfully weaponizing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in an attempt to force private businesses and States to implement ‘transgender’ mandates — and Texas is suing to stop them.”
Pronouns and tranny bathrooms are popular with far leftwing activists, but deeply unpopular with ordinary American citizens. No voters outside of San Francisco (and possibly not even there) would vote for these policies, so the Democratic Party’s activist cadres must impose them by stealth via judicial and executive fiat. Just as with the Title IX cases, expect this radical activist regulation to wither under judicial scrutiny.
Multiple lower courts have blocked the Biden Administration’s attempt to unilaterally rewrite the meaning of Title IX in favor of transexism via executive fiat, holding that it violates the clear intent and language of the original statute. However, the Biden Administration has constantly appealed those injunctions. Now the Supreme Court has weighed in, upholding the lower court injunctions.
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has rejected the Biden administration’s request to reinstate most of its new Title IX guidance.
With a 5 to 4 decision that saw Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the three liberal justices in dissent, the rule remains blocked while further litigation continues.
In April, the Biden administration and the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) issued the rule that includes changes to how federal civil rights law protects against “discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.”
Several states, including Louisiana and Tennessee, filed lawsuits against the DOE, arguing that the new Title IX guidance overstepped legal boundaries or conflicted with state laws.
In the litigation that preceded this SCOTUS issuance, the lower courts blocked the new rule from being enforced in some states, and the higher courts, the Courts of Appeal for the 5th and 6th Circuits, allowed that block to stay in place while the legal process continued.
The federal government then filed an emergency application with SCOTUS to stay the preliminary injunctions, pending resolution of the appeals in the 5th and 6th Circuits.
“The Court denies the Government’s applications,” states the majority SCOTUS opinion.
The leading opinion explains that the provisions of the DOE rule that include the new definition of “sex discrimination” to include “sexual orientation and gender identity” will remain blocked from implementation, but added that this part is too connected to the rest of the rule to allow other parts to go into effect.
The majority opinion states that “the Government has not provided this Court a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts’ interim conclusions that the three provisions found likely to be unlawful are intertwined with and affect other provisions of the rule. Nor has the Government adequately identified which particular provisions, if any, are sufficiently independent of the enjoined definitional provision and thus might be able to remain in effect.”
For perverse ideological reasons, Democrats seems to have made exposing children to homosexuality and transexism a central tenet of their party, despite widespread opposition from American citizens in general and parents specifically. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has sided with the multiple states and school districts that have sued to stop this particular instance of woke madness, though the narrow 5-4 nature of the ruling is concerning.
Given that the same radical Obama retreads would also man a theoretical Harris Administration, expect Democrats to continue to push hard to impose their radical transexual agenda on America’s children.
Real inflation is running about 20%, Kamala parties like it’s 1971, the New York Times is shocked, shocked to discover Hunter Biden asking for state favors for foreign cronies, gold hits new highs, laughing at an old SNL skit is now a thoughtcrime, and an update on Intel’s woes.
The New York Times reports that the federal government is accelerating the naturalization of immigrants in America as part of a process of “reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” according to one observer quoted in the piece.
“The federal government is processing citizenship requests at the fastest clip in a decade, moving rapidly through a backlog that built up during the Trump administration and the coronavirus pandemic,” reports the newspaper.
One Honduran woman marveled at the fact that authorities were able to process and approve her application in as little as six months.
The story highlights how many of these new citizens will immediately become eligible to vote in key battleground states, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The piece includes a very revealing quote from Xiao Wang, chief executive of Boundless, a data analysis company.
“The surge in naturalization efficiency isn’t just about clearing backlogs; it’s potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” said Wang.
“Every citizenship application could be a vote that decides Senate seats or even the presidency,” he added.
In other words, knowing that immigrants are far likelier to vote Democrat, the Biden administration is importing them at breakneck speed in order to tip the scales for Kamala Harris.
3.3 million immigrants have become citizens during Biden’s time in office, with data showing that more will vote Democrat than Republican.
This has partly driven the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal more to “Jamal” and “Enrique,” and not so much “Karen,” although the strategy has caused division amongst Trump’s base.
The legacy media has consistently denounced the idea of mass migration being a deliberate ploy to increase the voter base for Democrats as part of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, while simultaneously admitting it’s happening.
Democrats have declared that they have no confidence in the electorate and must create a new one…
Restaurant owner says that the real inflation rate is closer to 20% over six months:
The owner of four restaurants made this video when inflation was at 3.5%. Today, we’re told that inflation is at 2.9%. He looked at the prices of some products and concluded that the government’s inflation numbers don’t make sense. Since February, food prices have increased:
How does Kamala Harris plan to combat inflation? By channeling Richard Nixon from 1971 and imposing wage and price controls.
After the unoriginal Vice President Kamala Harris stole former President Trump’s proposed ‘no tax on tips’ policy, she’s at it again with yet another recycled idea. This time, she’s echoing President Biden’s actions and rhetoric to crack down on sky-high food prices by proposing the first-ever federal ban on “corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries”—a move that reeks of socialism.
“There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign wrote in a statement, adding, “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”
The Harris campaign said the vice president will unveil the new federal proposed ban on Friday at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina as part of a broader economic policy platform. The proposal will ensure food companies can’t exploit consumers to increase profits, according to CBS News, citing Harris-Walz campaign officials.
Harris’ policy speech will also call on the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys to examine corporations violating price-fixing rules. Her remarks are expected to echo Biden’s actions and rhetoric, especially with his war against meat processing companies that he alleges are responsible for higher burger prices at the supermarket.
VP Harris’ campaign argues that lowering Americans’ costs is a function of socialist-style price controls. Yet this is the quickest way to understand that Harris’ economic team has no actual understanding of inflation.
Heritage Foundation’s EJ Antoni explained, “Here’s your “price gouging” narrative: average costs paid by businesses have risen just as much as costs charged to consumers – if businesses are being “greedy,” they’re doing it all wrong…”
Instead of curbing out-of-control government spending, which debt rises $1 trillion every 100 days, and understanding that monetary inflation driven by the Federal Reserve’s money creation is the root cause of inflation, Harris deflects the actual problem: The Fed. She instead goes after big corporations for ‘illegal price gouging.’
Thus unable to understand the disasterous economic policies of the past are doomed to repeat it…
“Conversation Between Musk And Trump Generates Over A Billion Views.” You can see a transcript of the interview here.
In a post last month (“How The Democrats Los Silicon Valley”), I mentioned that top Silicon Valley venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had endorsed Trump.
Ben Horowitz, in particular, seemed like an unusual Trump supporter, coming from a liberal Jewish background. Now it looks like Trump has another, thanks to his X space with Elon Musk last night: Zynga founder Mark Pincus. During the first Trump administration, Pincus opposed Trump’s “Muslim ban”, but after the leftist celebrations following October 7th last year, he seemed to have some second thoughts about that.
Despite corporate media’s unabashed u-turn to support Kamala Harris, her campaign has been busted creating made-up headlines next to the names of real news outlets to trick people into thinking they’ve stumbled upon the real thing, Axios reports.
Upon hearing the news, The Guardian lost their shit, telling Axios: “While we understand why an organization might wish to align itself with the Guardian’s trusted brand, we need to ensure it is being used appropriately and with our permission. We’ll be reaching out to Google for more information about this practice.”
The ads include links to real articles from the outlets, however the headlines and supporting text were altered.
“Democratic California State Lawmaker Switches To Republican Party…State Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil, who represents the state’s fourth Senate district, said she joined the Senate Republican Caucus and party after deep reflection and to help ‘in their fight to fix California.'”
While Joe Biden was vice president, his son Hunter attempted to obtain State Department assistance in securing a deal for Ukrainian gas company Burisma, of which Hunter was a highly-compensated board member despite having no experience in its industry, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The revelation of the 2016 episode underscores allegations that Hunter sought to enrich himself by trading on his father’s influence.
The Times report draws on newly-released government records pertaining to Hunter’s pushing of a Burisma deal in Italy. The Biden White House had resisted releasing the files for years, only to relent soon after Biden was pressured into abandoning his reelection bid.
One wonders how long the New York Times would have waited to report this if Biden were still seeking reelection? My guess is never.
Go figure. It’s amazing what some actual reporting — and a withdrawal from a presidential election — can shake loose, no?
Just four short years ago, we were all assured by the Protection Racket Media that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and that allegations of influence-peddling by the Bidens were just political dirty tricks, right? Right? Wrong. The New York Times’ Ken Vogel reports that Hunter’s efforts to sell influence within the administration were well known during Joe Biden’s term as Vice President. It’s even about Burisma, the company that we were told paid Hunter a lot of money for his energy-industry expertise.
Oh, and the records of it got “withheld” by the Biden administration for “years,” too:
Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.
The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.
Well, we did have records in October 2020. Hunter Biden kept records of these dealings on his laptop, which he abandoned in a repair shop. When the New York Post reported on the contents of the laptop, including a number of emails that made clear he leveraged his fathers office to sell influence at Burisma and elsewhere, the media ignored it — even though one of Hunter’s partners (Tony Bobulinski) publicly authenticated the messages when asked.
Nearly four years later, the NYT gets around to the truth. And if you’re questioning the timing, you have good company, because Vogel appears to be somewhat curious about it as well:
The department’s release of documents to The New York Times came shortly after President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and as his son prepares to stand trial next month on charges of evading taxes on millions of dollars in income from Burisma and other foreign businesses.
Go figure again! It’s as if the cover-up extended as long as Joe Biden had electoral interests to protect. Now that Biden has pulled out of the race, there’s no need to keep covering up for Biden Inc.
“California Sheriff Blasts Harris For Using His Image In “Misleading” Campaign Ad, Says He Supports Trump.” “In light of a recent political ad put out by Kamala Harris featuring Sheriff [Mike] Boudreaux, as well as other local law enforcement, the Sheriff wants to make it abundantly clear that his image is being used without his permission, and he does NOT endorse Harris for President or any other political office.”
The same Jew-haters who drove Columbia University’s president Minouche Shafik off are now coming for Kamala Harris.
Only a short week ago, Harris was heckled by pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters, like those who has spilled out from college campuses after October 7. Protesters screamed out at her as she stood on stage repeating her stump speech. As they yelled, Harris tried to shame them. “I’m speaking,” she said, hearkening back to her VP debate against Mike Pence in 2020. “I’m speaking” in context means several things, including an attempt to grab control based on her identity factors: black, female. By identitarian logic, the vice president is oppressed, and by the logic of progressive discourse, that means that she gets to speak first, and that what she has to say carries all that much more weight. An event simply in favor of her candidacy was crashed in New York City on Wednesday night where agitators set off smoke bombs and held up signs saying “No Votes for Bombala’s Genocide.” 14 of them were arrested.
The agitators wanted some kind of response, some kind of indication of what Harris’ policy on Israel and Gaza might be if she gets voted into the White House. And they haven’t gotten it. Meanwhile, there are clearly massive anti-Israel events planned for the Democratic National Convention next week. While Kamala is trying to keep the euphoria going, attempting to dance and sing her way into the White House, her base will be out in the street demanding answers. Will she be lenient like Magill? Bend over backwards like Gay? Or call in a bigger force, like Shafik, because she doesn’t know how to handle it on her own?
The far left of Harris’ party hates Israel. They love Palestinians not for their culture or policies–which include anti-LGBTQ and anti-female regulations as in other strict, Muslim countries–but simply because they are “oppressed.” And Harris can’t handle them. Even at her speech, rarefied identity wasn’t enough to keep them in their place. The campus riots will likely start up again. As soon as the college-bound finish their orientations, they’ll be picking up their marching orders and protest signs to join their comrades on the quad.
There is already noise that Harris would like to throw Israel under the bus, to eradicate funding and arms shipments. The same woman that waved the flag of Ukraine in Congress as she promised to send him endless weapons and aid, may think the aid packages and arms sales to Israel go too far. Harris may sympathize with the protesters.
before his honeymoon [in Communist China in 1994], Walz launched a company called Educational Travel Adventures, which specialized in bringing American students to China. An article in the local Chinese media reported that he and his bride brought 50 students from America. The company continued to send students to China until 2003. It is important to note that operating a business in China requires all kinds of permits—both official and unofficial—from Chinese authorities at the local, provincial, and central levels. These permits were typically obtained either by paying bribes or by securing endorsements, whether tacit or open, from government officials.
Professional atheist Richard Dawkins posts that men and women are different and male boxers shouldn’t be competing with female boxers. Result: Facebook nuked his account.
So what do you do when your software problem brings a customers operations down hard? Well, if you’re Crowdstrike and the customer is Delta airlines, then you slam Delta for not recovering fast enough.
Python Development Foundation suspends developer for enjoying old “Jane, you ignorant slut” skit. I can only imagine the snowflake reactions to the Chevy Chase/Richard Pryor word association skit…
Flock of self-driving Waymo cars in San Francisco honk all night in their parking lot. As you might be able to guess, nearby residents are just thrilled at this development…
Speaking of electric cars, there’s concerning over letting them park in parking garages because of the possibility of them catching fire and the difficulty of extinguishing same.
Remember how Intel said the problem with their chips was microcode? Yeah. That may not be the case (or at least not the whole case), and it may actually be a process problem involving oxidation of vias (i.e., the connection between two metal layers).
Right now Hollywood is taking it on the chin, the gut, the head, and just about every other metaphorical body part that can be punched.
Thanks to the Biden Recession and its resultant inflation, people are cutting back severely on their entertainment budgets to concentrate on such luxuries as “food” and “rent.” At the same time that started to kick in, Hollywood fully embraced wokeness, resulting in movies and TV shows that alienated large segments of their existing customer base. From 2015 to 2019, Hollywood brought in more than $11 billion in domestic box office, thanks largely to once-juggernaut franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar (a studio that used to function like a franchise) and Jurassic Park, and even throwing out Flu Manchu-wrecked 2020, they have yet to return to that level of ticket income. Note that the first three of those franchises all belonged to Disney, which came down with one of the worst cases of Social Justice, from which hasn’t entirely recovered, and Disney stock has been on a mostly steadily downward trend since 2021.
On top of that, the last five years saw most major studios jump headlong into the streaming wars. The result? Everyone lost except Netflix. Everyone lost money launching their streaming services, and the huge need for new content, plus the mind virus of wokeism, meant garbage like Rings of Power, Velma and She-Hulk got green-lit. For Disney, the need for content not only radically increased costs, but also helped cheapen the previous powerhouse brands of Marvel and Star Wars with too much mediocre-to-bad content.
But the jump into streaming didn’t just increase costs, it decreased the income from existing revenue streams like broadcast and cable TV (now referred to as “linear” TV). With so much premium content moving to Internet-based services, a whole lot more people cut the cord for cable TV.
While all this was happening, Hollywood’s actors and writers unions looked at the money being shoveled into streaming and went “Hey, we want a bigger cut of that,” and went on strike, some even losing their houses (which honestly for a four month strike, seems like really poor financial planning) in the process. As a result, they won pay increases and additional “seats” in writer’s rooms right before everything started to collapse.
The results? Layoffs. “During the 2023 Hollywood strikes, the Los Angeles region’s share of national Film and TV employment fell to 27%, compared to 35% just the year before.” More: “Employment is down 9.1% (12,900 jobs) from 2013 to 2024 for the traditional entertainment industries of Film and TV, Sound, Print Media and Broadcasting.” I don’t think anyone thinks of 2013 as any kind of “golden age.” (Well, except maybe for the finale of Breaking Bad.) More: “Employment in ‘motion picture and sound recording’ has grown nationwide, but the share of workers in LA or New York went from just under half at the beginning of 2023 to just one-third earlier this year.”
This is why Deadline has a regular Hollywood Contraction section. Things are so bad that they’re even laying off executives (I know, world’s smallest violin), and many don’t expect to ever be employed in the industry again. “If you’re a middle-age white man, you’re feeling really struggling to see if you’re going to be hired again.”
Let’s list a few of Hollywood’s litany of woes, some of which we’ve covered here before.
Paramount was pretty much forced to merge with Skydance, resulting in massive layoffs.
Including: “Paramount Television Studios Shut Down by Paramount Global Cost Cuts. Paramount Television Studios, a production facility originally aimed at getting Paramount Pictures back into the business of making TV series, will shut down, the latest bout of cost cutting by parent corporation Paramount Global as it seeks to eliminate $500 million amid a chaotic shift in the entertainment industry.” They were the ones producing the Time Bandits TV show for Apple+ that pretty much no one thought was a good idea.
Speaking of Apple (not strictly speaking a Hollywood company, but one that plunged into the streaming wars), they’ve throttled back the money hose after being one of the more profligate streaming spenders. “Shaw also points out some examples of runaway spending at Apple, including bloat on ‘Severance,’ its glum, well-regarded dystopian/workplace series. The new season of that show will cost $20 million an episode — a staggering sum for a series that doesn’t have any digital dragons.” $20 million an episode. Season 2 had ten episodes. At $20 a month for an Apple+ subscription, you would need to pull in nearly a million new viewers, subscribing for an entire year, to break even. Apple+’s entire subscriber base is evidently 18 million, so that seems…unlikely.
There are reports that Marvel Studios (a division of Disney) has actually purged woke producers from its ranks, but that Lucasfilms (another division of Disney) has retained head Kathleen Kennedy, whose woke girlboss storylines have run both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises into the ground.
And then, as this contraction runs its course, all of Hollywood has to worry about the looming threat of AI. AI is not good enough for Joe Schmo to make movies that rival Hollywood from his PC, but given enough computing power, we may live to see it. But in the meantime, a whole lot of technical jobs are probably going to disappear into AI expert systems. Instead of five lighting techs, there will be one lighting tech overseeing the AI automatically adjusting the networked smart lights.
It’s possible that 2019, the year when Avengers: Endgame was setting box office records, may be looked back on as the pinnacle of Hollywood’s 21st Century Golden Age…
