Congratulations on surviving the first 1/6th of 2024! The Big Guy is exactly who we knew he was all along, Houston police screw up, some big crime stories, Wayne LaPierre is found guilty, and the world’s saddest Oompa Loompa. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Remember when Joe Biden told the American people that his son didn’t make money in China?” asked Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) in a video posted to X. ““Well, not only did he lie about his son Hunter making money in China, but it also turns out that $40,000 in laundered China money landed in Joe Biden’s bank account in the form of a personal check.”
Today, a U.S. District Court issued its final judgment in Texas v. Garland, which was a challenge to the U.S. House’s proxy voting rule under the Quorum Clause of the Constitution. In its final judgment, the Court concluded that U.S. House members must be physically present for their vote to comply with the Constitution’s Quorum Clause. Attorneys from the Texas Public Policy Foundation argued the merits at trial in January of this year.
The lawsuit was originally filed with the State of Texas in response to Congress’ unlawful passage of the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill in December 2022. The U.S. Constitution requires a quorum, or a majority, of House members to be physically present for the U.S. House of Representatives to conduct business. As less than half of the members were present when the legislation was passed, with the rest voting by proxy, this legislation never should have passed, and the president should not have signed it.
“This meticulous, 120-page opinion was written after a full trial on the merits,” said TPPF senior attorney Matt Miller. “The Court correctly concluded that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 violated the Quorum Clause of the U.S. Constitution because a majority of House members was not physically present when the $1.7 trillion spending bill was passed. Proxy voting is unconstitutional.”
This basically says that every bit of that $1.7 trillion spending was unconstitutional, along with any laws, etc. passed in that omnibus. Just how do you back out all that money that’s been spent, assuming this is upheld?
Record meth bust in Eagle Pass. “The U.S. Customs and Border Protections (CBP) have seized six and a half tons of methamphetamine, over 13,000 pounds, at the Eagle Pass Port of Entry, making it the largest ever seizure in a single enforcement action.”
Mitch McConnell announced on Wednesday that he will step down as the Senate Republican leader in November, ending his tenure as the longest-serving Senate leader in history.
“This will be my last term as Republican Leader of the Senate,” the 82-year-old veteran of the chamber said to his colleagues on the Senate floor. “I’m not going anywhere… It’s time for the next generation of leadership.”
He’ll leave the senate when his term ends in 2027. You can condemn him as the ultimate swamp creature, or praise him for his effectiveness at things like getting Trump’s Supreme Court picks confirmed. It’s two sides of the same coin. I’m not sure he was as effective as Trent Lott or Howard Baker.
Houston Police Department Chief Troy Finner called it a “dark day” at a press conference for the Houston Police Department, announcing that 4,107 adult sexual assault cases were wrongly closed without investigation.
A case management code “suspended for lack of personnel” was used, which led to closing the cases without actually investigating them.
Finner said he was first made aware the code even existed in 2021 and instructed HPD’s special victims division to stop using the code; however, he found out on February 7, 2024 that it continued. HPD first began using the code in 2016.
He said he immediately ordered a review of all cases suspended using this code dating back to 2016, which will take at least 30 days to complete. While the number of cases they have today is 4,017, he says it is “fluid and subject to change.”
60 Minutes gets to enjoy some of that vibrant Muslim diversity in Sweden to the sides of their faces.
60 Minutes goes to Sweden to make a heart warming special about diversity, but see a different situation, then this happens. pic.twitter.com/oUd2ZuJ0RV
“After five days of deliberations, a jury in New York on Friday held the National Rifle Association liable for financial mismanagement and found that Wayne LaPierre, the group’s former CEO, corruptly ran the nation’s most prominent gun rights group. The jury determined that LaPierre’s violation of his duties cost the NRA $5,400,000, though he already repaid roughly $1.5 million to the organization.” Here’s the thing: While they prosecution was unquestionably politically motivated, LaPierre did run a crooked ship. In the long run, forcing Wayne and his corrupt cronies from office has done the NRA a huge favor.
Argentine President Javier Milei just ended his country’s budget deficit in nine weeks. If Trump and the Republicans manage to control both houses of congress next year, there’s no reason they can’t balance the budget…assuming they have the will.
“Austin Fire Department Chaplain Dismissed for Comments on Transgender Athletes Sues for Free Speech Violation. A chaplain for the Austin Fire Department was dismissed from his position after expressing beliefs on his personal blog about protecting women’s sports.”
After a volunteer chaplain of the Austin Fire Department (AFD) was fired for posting on his personal blog that men and women are biologically different and should not compete against each other in sports, a lawsuit was filed in an effort to protect his rights to free speech and religious freedom.
The Alliance Defending Freedom said in a press release that it filed a motion Tuesday on behalf of Dr. Andrew Fox, who served in a voluntary capacity as chaplain for AFD before he was dismissed in 2021.
Unlike APD, AFD public and union leadership has been infected by social justice. Dr. Fox appears to have a very strong case on viewpoint discrimination grounds.
White TV host tries to race-bait Jerry Seinfeld for hosting “mostly” white male comedians on his show. It doesn’t go well for him.
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bipartisan bill into law authorizing the release of grand jury transcripts from an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. The new legislation, signed by the Florida governor on Thursday, will allow a public release of the jury’s transcripts from the 2006 probe into Epstein’s abuse of underage girls. The new measure goes into effect July 1.”
Weird Austin crime story: “Prominent local businessman arrested in Austin, accused of arson.”
A prominent Austin businessman and founder of Continental Automotive Group, or CAG, was arrested Thursday on charges of Felony Arson and a State Jail Felony offense of Burglary.
Dorsey Bryan Hardeman, 75, is accused of starting a fire at a downtown Austin building on Sunday, according to an arrest affidavit.
According to Travis County court records, Trey Collins with the Minton, Bassett, Flores & Carsey firm has been retained as the attorney representing Hardeman. Sam Bassett told KXAN the office has just begun its work and “it is premature to comment. However, we will provide Mr. Hardeman an appropriate and vigorous defense.”
The affidavit said the Austin Fire Department responded to a building fire at the former Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop on 400 Nueces St. on Feb. 25.
Once the fire was contained, fire investigators determined the incident to be incendiary and found metal shavings on the ground below the door suggesting the door lock had been drilled out, records state.
The affidavit states fire investigators watched video surveillance from the building, which showed an older man entering the building with a red container consistent with a plastic gas tank.
Multiple cameras inside the building show a man pouring liquid from the red container and dropping multiple matches on the ground, the affidavit said.
Records show the man arrived at the location in a white 4-door Mercedez SUV.
Investigators interviewed the owner of Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop who told AFD Hardeman was the owner of the property next door and had previously asked about purchasing the property at 400 Nueces St.
This is not what people refer to as “the perfect crime.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Remember Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me? It turns out McDonalds didn’t destroy his liver, a decade of alcoholism did.
More Biden corruption evidence, a would-be mass shooter turns out to be a pro-Palestinian Bernie Sis, a parent beats the snot out of a would-be child kidnapper, a top sniper dies, Disney gets sued, and Venus is feeling Zoove. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Another “Try to contain your shock” headline: “Joe Biden’s Classified Docs Provide More Evidence Hunter’s Pay-To-Play Was A Family Affair.”
The special counsel report on Joe Biden’s unauthorized removal and disclosure of classified documents exposed much more than our president’s mental deficits and the breadth of his irresponsible handling of top-secret and classified information. The report revealed a close nexus between Hunter Biden’s influence peddling and his father’s responsibilities and access to intel during the elder’s term as vice president.
On Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur released the results of his investigation into the president stemming from the discovery of top-secret and classified documents at Biden’s D.C.-based Penn Biden Center, his private Delaware home, and the University of Delaware. While the specific details in the recovered documents remain unknown, the nearly 400-page report provided an extensive enough summary of the materials to confirm an overlap in the timing and topics of Joe Biden’s vice presidency and Hunter Biden’s “business” enterprises.
Ukraine Overlap
Appendix A of the report provided a table summary of the documents recovered. Many of the top-secret and classified documents concerned Ukraine during the time frame when Hunter Biden acted as an intermediary between Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and the vice president. Recall that Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee that in early March 2014, he met Zlochevsky while in Moscow. And soon after, he and Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, receiving $83,000 per month.
The following month, Hunter Biden sent Archer an email dated April 13, 2014 — one week before Joe Biden would travel to Ukraine and meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Referring to “my guys upcoming travels,” Hunter then elaborated on “22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s ‘destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk,’” according to the New York Post.
Among the material recovered from President Biden’s unauthorized storage locales were several top-secret and otherwise classified or confidential documents discussing Ukraine. One undated document discussed issues related to Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Another, dated Sept. 17, 2014, consisted of a “Memorandum for the Vice President from staff members, with subject ‘U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine.’” Also dated Sept. 17, 2014, was an “event memo” from a vice-presidential national security staffer, titled, “Lunch with Ukrainian President Poroshenko,” which was scheduled for the following day.
The overlap between Joe Biden’s Ukraine-related work and Hunter Biden’s Burisma profiteering became more pronounced in 2015. On Dec. 2, 2015, the lobbying firm Blue Star Group, which Hunter Biden had arranged to work with Burisma, wrote to Burisma that it had “participated in a conference call today with senior Obama Administration officials ahead of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine next week.” The memorandum provided a summary of the conference call, telling Burisma that “Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden’s Special Advisor for Europe and Russia, and Dr. Colin Kahl, the Vice President’s National Security Advisor, presented the agenda for the trip and answered questions about current U.S. policy toward Ukraine.”
Two days after receiving this memorandum, Burisma executives Zlochevsky and Vadym Pozharskyi, on Dec. 4, 2015, pushed Hunter Biden to call his father. The Burisma executives, according to Archer, expressed concern over the pressure they were under from Ukrainian investigators.
And there’s more, though very little that will be surprising to BattleSwarm readers. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Joe Biden met with the chairman of the Chinese energy firm CEFC shortly after Hunter Biden’s business associate Rob Walker received a $3 million payment from the firm as part of a joint venture the pair were then trying to develop, according to a newly released transcript of Walker’s closed-door congressional testimony.
Walker testified before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees on January 26 about his role in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC.
Walker received roughly $3 million from CEFC in March 2017 through its State Energy HK account, bank records show. He recalled a meeting between Joe Biden and CEFC officials in spring 2017, around the time of the State Energy HK payment.
“Did Joe Biden ever attend any location or meeting or place where CEFC officials were also there?” a staffer asked Walker, according to a transcript of the interview released Tuesday morning.
“Yes,” Walker replied. He recalled the meeting took place in Washington, D.C., and Joe Biden, who had just left office as vice president, stopped by for lunch.
“I don’t know the exact — it was 20- probably -17 at some point, but I don’t know exactly when,” Walker said.
The meeting took place at a Four Seasons hotel in a private room. CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming and other associates were present at the meeting.
“I don’t know if Zang was there, but I believe that Ye was there. I’m certain of it,” Walker testified.
He did not know who the other CEFC associates were at the meeting. Walker firmly recalled Jianming and his translator, Hunter Biden, business associate James Gilliar, and Joe Biden attending the meeting.
Well, what do you know? “Mail-In Ballot Fraud Study Finds Trump ‘Almost Certainly’ Won In 2020.”
A new study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election concludes that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail.
The Heartland Institute study tried to gauge the probable impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots cast for both then-candidate Joe Biden and his opponent, President Donald Trump, would have had on the overall 2020 election results.
The study was based on data obtained from a Heartland/Rasmussen survey in December that revealed that roughly one in five mail-in voters admitted to potentially fraudulent actions in the presidential election.
After the researchers carried out additional analyses of the data, they concluded that mail-in ballot fraud “significantly” impacted the 2020 presidential election.
They also found that, absent the huge expansion of mail-in ballots during the pandemic, which was often done without legislative approval, President Trump would most likely have won.
“Had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected,” the report’s authors wrote.
Not news to those of us who watched returns into the wee hours, only to wake up to The Steal the next morning.
Ukraine bags another Russian ship. “Ukrainian Magura V5 Marine Drones have sunk the Ropucha-class landing ship Cesar Kunikov near Alupka in Crimea in the Black Sea.”
Putin says he prefers Biden to Trump in the White House because he’s more predictable. I’m sure he does. Notice that both his Ukraine invasions occurred during Democratic presidential administrations.
The woman who tried to shoot up Lakewood Church in Houston was a Bernie Sis who had “Free Palestine” written on her AR-15. “[Genesse I.] Moreno had a violent, extensive criminal history stretching back to 2005, according to court records reviewed by Townhall. She was previously arrested for assaulting a public servant, assault causing bodily injury, forgery, theft for stealing cosmetics from a store, evading police, and unlawfully carrying a weapon, among a slew of charges on Moreno’s decades-old rap sheet.”
Alan Winston Filion, 17, is suspected of targeting hundreds of high schools, mosques, historically Black churches, US senators and even the US Supreme Court with swatting attacks that placed thousands of people in the crosshairs of heavily armed police response teams.
Prosecutors say the 6ft 3in teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response”, and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.
Mr Filion would then post chilling audio of the 911 calls on Telegram as a proof of purchase, according to court documents.
Among the hundreds of “swats” that Torswats allegedly claimed credit for were multiple hoax callouts at the home of Patrick S. Tomlinson, a Milwaukee-based science fiction author who says he has been swatted dozens of times in the past four years as part of a targeted harassment campaign by a group of “sociopathic” stalkers.
You’d think after five or six times, the guy would put up a sign in his front yard alerting police to the problem. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Court Orders Netherlands To Halt F-35 Parts For Israel As EU Says “Too Many People” Are Dying.” Excuse me? Does the Netherlands let their court interfere in foreign policy decisions and defense contracts based on events beyond their borders?
The US Army is cancelling its next generation Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, service officials announced today, taking a potential multi-billion-dollar contract off the table and throwing the service’s long-term aviation plans into doubt.
In addition, the Army plans to end production on the UH-60 V Black Hawk in fiscal 2025, due to “significant cost growth,” keep General Electric’s Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP) in the development phase instead of moving it into production, and phase the Shadow and Raven unmanned aerial systems out of the fleet, the service added.
All told, it reflects a massive shift in the Army’s aviation strategy and upends years of planning. There is also an ironic sense of history repeating: the decision to end FARA comes two decades to the month after the Army ended its plans to procure the RAH-66 Comanche and nearly 16 years after it terminated work on the ARH-70A Arapaho, both aircraft designed to replace the Kiowa — the same helicopter FARA was supposed to, finally, replace.
The reason for ending FARA, Army leaders told a small group of reporters ahead of the announcement, is a reflection of what war looks like in the modern era.
“We absolutely are paying attention [to world events] and adjusting, because we could go to war tonight, this weekend,” head of Army Futures Command Gen. James Rainey told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday.
“We are learning from the battlefield — especially Ukraine — that aerial reconnaissance has fundamentally changed,” Army Chief Gen. Randy George said in a press release. “Sensors and weapons mounted on a variety of unmanned systems and in space are more ubiquitous, further reaching and more inexpensive than ever before.”
Many commenters here feared the Pentagon wasn’t taking the drone threat seriously. Maybe they are…
The Marine Corps’ all-time deadliest sniper, Chuck Mawhinney, has died at age 75.
From 1968 to 1969, Mawhinney — still only a teenager — was credited with 103 confirmed kills.
An additional 216 kills were listed as “probable” since the enemies’ bodies were risky to verify in the active war zone.
Mawhinney had confirmed kills over 1,000 yards, with the average kill shot for snipers during the Vietnam War taken at a distance of 300 to 800 yards.
He received a Bronze Star with Combat Valor, Navy Achievement Medal, Navy Commendation Medal with Combat Valor, and two Purple Hearts.
Having more confirmed kills than Carlos Hathcock is pretty impressive. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The CW Network (which evidently still exists) just launched a 12 channel free streaming platform. Including, evidently, a Mystery Science Theater 3000 channel.
The Senate’s bad border deal goes down badly, Big Brother is (still) watching you, Netanyahu tells everyone calling for a Gaza ceasefire to stick it in their murder tunnels, more Democrats arrested for (or convicted of) fraud, and a tiny bit of Disney news. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Republicans took one look at the abomination of a “bipartisan” border deal and declared it dead on arrival.
In a key vote on Wednesday, Senate Republicans moved to block the long-anticipated bipartisan border deal, which ties border-security provisions to aid for both Israel and Ukraine.
The bill was blocked in a 49 to 50 procedural vote, with only four Republicans joining Democrats in backing the legislation. The bill needed 60 votes to advance.
This setback comes after months of negotiations between Senate Republicans and Democrats on a measure President Joe Biden strongly requested. While the GOP wants more resources allocated toward the southern border, House Republicans and former president Donald Trump have made it clear they don’t want the legislation tied to foreign aid.
Hours after the bill’s details were revealed Sunday night, House GOP leaders rejected the package and declared it “DEAD on arrival in the House.”
Trump, who has made the border crisis a central issue of his 2024 presidential campaign, also weighed in on the border deal earlier this week. “Don’t be STUPID!!! We need a separate Border and Immigration Bill. It should not be tied to foreign aid in any way, shape, or form!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Before the Senate voted on the matter, Biden blamed Trump for Republicans’ fierce opposition to the bill.
“Now, all indications are this bill won’t even move forward to the Senate floor,” Biden said Tuesday. “Why? A simple reason: Donald Trump.”
Hey Biden, I’m already going to vote for Trump. You don’t need to keep giving me new reasons.
The $118 billion Senate proposal includes about $60 billion in Ukraine funding, $14 billion in Israel aid, and $20 billion in border-security improvements, among various other items listed in the legislative package.
Senators James Lankford of Oklahoma, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah were the only Republicans to vote in favor of the bill on Wednesday.
Lankford should be ashamed to be in such company.
Texas isn’t taking the Biden Administrations abrogation of the rule of law lying down. “Texas Attorney General’s Legal Challenge to Biden Administration’s ‘Asylum Rule’ Will Proceed. A federal judge ruled Texas raised a plausible claim that the federal government is violating the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) announced a procedural victory in one of its many ongoing lawsuits against the federal government this week, after a federal district judge ruled against a motion by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to dismiss a legal challenge to its “asylum rule,” saying Texas had a plausible constitutional challenge.
According to the OAG, the federal government violated the Appointments Clause in the U.S. Constitution when the DHS granted power to review asylum cases to immigration officers — a power uniquely held under federal statute by immigration judges.
“This case offers a rare opportunity to litigate the application of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, which states that Congress may only vest the power to appoint “inferior Officers… in the President alone, the Courts of Law, or the Heads of Departments,” the OAG wrote in a press statement regarding the case.
The office explained that by using asylum officers to perform jobs Congress assigned to judges when said officers were not appointed in the same manner, DHS violated the Constitution.
The OAG also argues that asylum officers are granting more noncitizens asylum than otherwise would be entitled to it. This is causing surges at the border and population increases that are in turn increasing the state’s costs relating to the increases, the state says.
“It is tremendously important for Texas and for our Constitutional order that this case is allowed to move forward,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said regarding the case. “The Biden Administration must not be permitted to ignore Congress and violate the Constitution. We take every opportunity to hold Biden accountable for his unlawful overreach.”
Rank-and-file Border Patrol agents have slammed the Senate’s $118B Senate funding bill that would guarantee 1.5 million illegal migrants entry to the United States, while sending the majority of funds to Ukraine ($60B+) and Israel ($14.1B).
Snip.
“Now that I’ve seen more of it, they can respectfully go fuck themselves. The more I’m seeing the more it just puts what they’ve been doing in writing. You want to shut this down, it’s real easy. Team up [the Department of Defense] with DHS and let us enforce like we were supposed to,” one agent told the Caller, adding “I feel like we are the only nation in the world that is this dumb about the border. Maybe it’s because we haven’t.”
Oh, and “Aliens from noncontiguous countries shall not be included in the sum of aliens encountered.” Did America’s enemies write this thing?
Cruz went on to say he knew [the Biden border bill] “had zero chance of passage” and that the entire purpose of the bill was to give “political camouflage to Democrats running in November.”
“Joe Biden can secure the border any day he wants,” Cruz said. “He doesn’t want to.”
The Secure the Border Act, which passed in the lower chamber as as House Resolution (H.R.) 2, was introduced to the Senate by Cruz in September of 2023, a fact he highlighted Wednesday, saying to “give me Ukraine aid and H.R. 2 and I’ll vote for that.”
H.R. 2 would have continued construction of the border wall, reinstated the “remain in Mexico” policy, and added border patrol agents and technology for both the southern and northern borders.
“Democrats do not want to secure the border; they want this invasion,” Cruz continued. “The Americans who are dying as a result, they’re [Democrats] willing to look the other way.”
A few weeks ago, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s office released a letter to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, an arm of the Treasury Department. Jordan’s team was asking Bishoff for answers about why FinCEN had “distributed slides, prepared by a financial institution,” detailing how other private companies might use MCC transaction codes to “detect customers whose transactions may reflect ‘potential active shooters.’”
The slide suggested the “financial company” was sorting for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA,” and watching for purchases of small arms and sporting goods, or purchases in places like pawn shops or Cabela’s, to identify financial threats.
Jordan’s letter to Bishoff went on:
According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of “extremism” indicators that include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” or “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”
During the Twitter Files, we searched for snapshots of the company’s denylist algorithms, i.e. whatever rules the platform was using to deamplify or remove users. We knew they had them, because they were alluded to often in documents (a report on the denylist is_Russian, which included Jill Stein and Julian Assange, was one example).
However, we never found anything like the snapshot Jordan’s team just published:
The highlighted portion shows how algorithmic analysis works in financial surveillance.
First compile a list of naughty behaviors, in the form of MCC codes for guns, sporting goods, and pawn shops.
Then, create rules: $2,500 worth of transactions in the forbidden codes, or a number showing that more than 50% of the customer’s transactions are the wrong kind, might trigger a response.
The Committee wasn’t able to specify what the responses were in this instance, but from previous experience covering anti-money-laundering (AML) techniques at banks like HSBC, a good guess would be generation of something like Suspcious Activity Reports, which can lead to a customer being debanked.
If Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already shown a tendency toward wide-scale monitoring of speech and the use of subtle levers to apply pressure on attitudes, financial companies can use records of transactions to penetrate individual behaviors far more deeply. Especially if enhanced by AI, a financial history can give almost any institution an immediate, unpleasantly accurate outline of anyone’s life, habits, and secrets. Worse, they can couple that picture with a powerful disciplinary lever, in the form of the threat of closed accounts or reduced access to payment services or credit. Jordan’s slide is a picture of the birth of the political credit score.
Tiabbi says worse revelations are to come…
“Netanyahu Rejects Hamas Cease-Fire Demands, Vows to Fight until ‘Absolute Victory.'”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Hamas cease-fire demands on Wednesday, vowing to fight on until “absolute victory.”
Netanyahu made the comments shortly after meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who arrived in the region Tuesday night after meeting with leaders of Qatar and Egypt in the most serious diplomatic push of the war to secure a cease-fire agreement. Through these diplomatic channels, Hamas presented Israel with a proposal for a three-stage cease-fire that would last for 135 days and culminate in the end of the war.
“Surrendering to Hamas’s delusional demands that we heard now not only won’t lead to freeing the captives, it will just invite another massacre.”
Indeed.
The Special Counsel’s report on Biden’s mishandling paints a picture of Biden’s mental decline we all know is true but which the media refuses to report.
President Biden couldn’t even remember when he was vice president or when his son Beau had died, leading special counsel Robert Hur to conclude that he could not bring charges for mishandling of classified documents, because a jury would see the president “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
In a report, Robert Hur concluded that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” But he declined to issue any charges, in part because Biden’s poor recollection would make him hard to convict.
If you want to see Fani Willis taken down only the way Ace of Spades can, then I direct your attention to “CashApp Cougar Fani Willis: Okay, Fine, So I Used Taxpayer Money to Hire a Human Meat-Mallet to Pound My Snizz Into Thin Tender Strips Like Veal Scallopini.” (Hat tip: Reader Tig if Brue.)
Members of the Austin American-Statesman took one look at the vast wave of layoffs hitting newsrooms across the country and decided “Now is the perfect time to go on strike!” (Note: Elon Musk should buy the name, fire everyone, and build a national quality newspaper from scratch.)
Dell demands all workers (no matter how far away) return to the office. Those who don’t will be “placed on a ‘career limiting’ fully remote contract. In my experience, working for Dell is itself career limiting…
Budget drag race community comes together to help fan with terminal brain tumor who’s also the happiest guy they know. “Don’t feel bad for me. Everyone’s terminal.”
Tons of Fani Willis’ crooked shenanigans come to light, Ukraine bags another warship, all those things they said the vaccine wouldn’t do it’s doing, and an anger management therapist who was very poor at his job. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Business partners of District Attorney Fani Willis’ alleged lover Nathan Wade, whom she appointed to work on the case against former President Donald Trump, made donations to her campaign before receiving lucrative contracts from her office.
Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former partner, and Christopher Campbell, his current partner, have collectively contributed more than $5,000 to Willis’ campaign, contribution disclosure reports show. Moreover, both men have each raked in tens of thousands of dollars from contracts with the district attorney’s office, according to county records.
Campbell is a partner at Wade & Campbell Firm, where he works with Wade. Bradley formerly worked with Wade at Wade, Bradley & Campbell Firm, and also represented Wade in his divorce case until Sept. 2022.
The donations add another wrinkle to Willis’ already-scrutinized relationship with Wade.
Willis was accused in a motion earlier this month by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman of benefiting from the “lucrative” contract she awarded Wade when he took her on vacations using money earned from the position. Wade filed to divorce his wife on Nov. 2, 2021, the day after his contract with the district attorney’s office began, and has earned nearly $700,000 from the Fulton County District Attorney’s office since his appointment.
More Willis shenanigans: “DA Fani Willis fired a whistleblower who informed her about the intentional misuse of federal funds and there’s audio of their conversation.”
BREAKING: @FreeBeacon has obtained audio of a whistleblower privately warning Fani Willis in 2021 that her top aide was trying to misuse federal funds.
Willis did not dispute the allegations.
56 days later, Willis fired the whistleblower and perp walked her out of the office. pic.twitter.com/YEkKIB2L5f
Resident Biden appears to be in serious trouble with black voters ahead of the 2024 election, and black lawmakers and organizers are starting to panic.
“What I’m hearing in my district is how ‘Bidenomics’ hasn’t really hit them in the pocket,” New York representative Jamaal Bowman told National Review earlier this week on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. “I need him in the barbershops. I need him on the basketball courts. I need him talking to the hip-hop community. I need him talking to the sports and athletics community to really get at what is troubling black men.”
Polling suggests Bowman is right to be concerned. Just 50 percent of black adults said they approve of Biden in a national AP-NORC poll last month — a 36-point drop from July 2021. An October Siena College/New York Times poll found that 22 percent of black voters surveyed in six competitive presidential battlegrounds say they will vote for Trump over Biden in 2024, a stunning polling shift from a reliably Democratic coalition that helped Biden win the White House in 2020. That same survey found Trump’s numbers were even higher among black men.
In the 40 years he’s spent in political activism, National Black Farmers Association president John Boyd Jr. says the Biden administration has done worse than any other administration in his lifetime in opening its doors to black voters. That lack of outreach, Boyd warns, may come back to bite him in November.
Wait, black people like jobs and safe neighborhoods and dislike inflation and illegal aliens sucking up welfare benefits? Who knew?
The U.N.’s agency for Palestinians said that it fired several employees after receiving information from Israel showing that they had taken part in the October 7 terrorist attacks. The State Department indicated that twelve U.N. employees allegedly took part in the attacks and announced that it had temporarily paused funding for the agency while it reviews the situation.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) delivers aid to Palestinians across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The U.S. is UNRWA’s largest donor, providing $343 million of its budget in 2022.
In a statement Friday morning, UNRWA commissioner general Philippe Lazzarini disclosed that Israel had presented his agency with evidence of its employees’ involvement in Hamas’s massacre of Israelis.
“To protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay. Any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution,” he said.
Sure they will. The question is why the United States ever funded UNRWA, since the funds seem to go straight into rockets and murder tunnels to kill Israeli civilians with?
The Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA in 2018, saying that the U.S. shoulders a disproportionate share of its budget. Blinken resumed funding to UNRWA three years later, pledging that the U.S. would seek reforms to the organization.
You know all those crazy “fringe” “conspiracy theories” about the Flu Manchu vaccine? Yeah, about that.
We found the number of myocarditis reports in VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years. This represented a 2500% increase in the absolute number of reports in the first year of the campaign when comparing historical values prior to 2021.
“Starbucks Employee Opposed to Unionization Sues to Declare National Labor Relations Board Unconstitutional.” “The National Labor Relations Board should not be a union boss-friendly kangaroo court run by powerful bureaucrats who exercise unaccountable power in violation of the Constitution.” This is another post-Chevron lawsuit that has the potential to completely dismantle the administrative state.
Proposition 2 allowed counties to create transportation reinvestment zones (TRZs), a power they did not previously have. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, a TRZ is a kind of tax increment financing district where a “zone is created, a base year is established, and the incremental increase in property tax revenue collected inside the zone is used to finance a project in the zone.”
The proposition did not include language about the use of increased ad valorem taxes to pay bonds or notes issued by the county in the TRZ district. A similar measure in 2011 that included such language was voted down.
“Anger management therapist loses his temper and murders a homeless man.” To be fair, the transient did try to fark with his dogs…
Woman with Master’s degree finds out that her trade school husband is quadrupling her salary with no debt.
EAGLE PASS, Texas (TND) — A convoy seeks to line the southern border with more than 700,000 vehicles and hold several rallies next week to demand action from the Biden administration.
The Take Our Border Back Southern Border Convoy will span from Virginia Beach, Va. to San Diego, Calif. and hold protests urging officials to enforce the Constitution’s amendments and halt human and drug trafficking across the border from Jan.29-Feb. 3.
Fellow citizens and compatriots … I call on you in the name of liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character to come to our aid with all dispatch,” Pete Chambers, one of the coalition’s commanders, wrote. “If this call is neglected, we are determined to sustain ourselves as long as possible and act like soldiers who never forget what is due to our own honor and that of our country.”
The convoy aims to “send a message” to local, state and federal officials and law enforcement that they need to close the border and deport all illegal immigrants in its plan to “shine a spotlight” on open borders. Chambers claims Americans are “besieged on all sides” by evil “dark forces.”
“We have sustained continual bombardments of tyranny and have maintained our honor, prestige and esprit de corps,” Chambers asserted. “The enemy has demanded the surrender of Lady Liberty and her children. Tyrannical actors have tortured and oppressed without cause, without mercy and without reprieve.”
This is a bad idea and a silly story. Before we get to the ideological reasons, let’s explicate a much more basic one: Math.
Since there are three routes, let’s divide that 700,000 into three, which gives us 233,333 each going to Eagle Pass, Texas, Yuma, Arizona and one from California to Yuma (all details from their website).
They say that not just 18-wheelers, but cars, campers, etc. are welcome. So let’s use the average car length of 14.7 feet (rather than an average 18-wheeler length of 70 feet) just to be on the conservative side. There are 5,280 feet to a mile. That yields 359 cars per mile.
That’s 649 miles of cars per convoy.
But wait! It gets worse! According to their route, they are taking 290 through Dripping Springs, Texas on their way to Eagle Pass. 290 is a four-lane state highway (two lanes each way). Dripping (as the locals call it) is a small town of just under 5,000 people that used to be way the hell out in the country and is now in the Austin exurbs.
In April of last year, I went through Dripping on the way to and from a dog rescue event. They were having their Founder’s Day Festival, which they say draws “thousands,” and traffic on 290 slowed to a crawl.
I think there are seven stoplights in Dripping proper, and much more between it and Austin, between Austin and Manor, Manor and Elgin, etc.
There’s no way 649 miles of cars and trucks are passing Dripping in one day. It’s probably pushing it to expect one week.
By contrast, the Canadian trucker protests (for reasons very immediately concerning the truckers themselves) may have had 2,000 trucks join. Even that many would tie up Dripping for several hours.
This is evidently the guy behind it, who I’ve never heard of before:
The Infowars watermark doesn’t give me much confidence.
This is all before we ask why would truckers even go to the border in the first place. To make a wall that illegal aliens could just duck under between your tires? To be seen on TV? Neither are good reasons to massively inconvenience ordinary Texans who are already suffering the worst under Biden’s failure to secure the border.
I’m not sure if this is a false flag or some puffed up idea of a local gadfly. The 700,000 is an impossibility, and I would expect the actual turnout to be a tiny handful. (They might expect the same, which is why the Dripping rallying point is an HEB parking lot.)
If you wanted to do something equally stupid and counterproductive, but at least have the satisfaction of irritating the actual targets of your ire, a rolling roadblock of the Beltway and all the arteries into and out of D.C. for days on in, blowing your horns like they did in Canada, that would at least piss off the people responsible…
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you’ve already familiar with some of how the Homeless Industrial Complex operates. Here’s a somewhat naive look at some of those problems.
There are some decent nuggets in here, but there are several big parts of the problem this piece ignores.
“America has a homelessness crisis as record numbers of people are ending up on the streets in a few concentrated city centers.”
“Cities are spending billions of dollars on failing projects to try and solve this problem, which has attracted a growing list of companies happy to provide their services for a price.”
“Helping the homeless has become a lucrative business, with multi-million dollar government contracts awarded every day. But if there’s so much money to be made, do these companies really want a long-term fix?”
Austin: “49 apartments for the homeless built at a whopping $739,000 a unit.”
“The annual budget for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority Rose from $63 million in 2015 to $808 million in 2022, a 1,300% increase in just 7 years. And what did the hardworking taxpayers of Los Angeles get for their money? The number of homeless people went up by 56%.”
“Everybody deserves the right to Affordable comfortable shelter.” False. Shelter is a good. Rights are God-given and Constitutionally guaranteed, not material goods.
LA: “The Inside Safe Homelessness Reduction Policy [was] to have social workers offer hotel rooms to homeless individuals while they sought out longer term housing arrangements data collected by the City and compiled by local news outlet The Center Square found that the plan had cost $250 million over just one year the program only served 1,463 individuals, which works out to be $17,000 per individual per month, that is over $200,000 every year being spent on one individual.”
“The homeless industrial complex is actually a combination of bad management structures, bad incentives, and bad market conditions.”
“The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is a joint Powers Authority that gets funding from federal, state, county and city budget budgets, but it doesn’t actually do any of the work itself.”
“According to the authority’s own website, the LHSA offers funding programs, design outcomes, assessment and technical assistance to more than 100 nonprofit partner agencies that assist people in experiencing homelessness achieve independence and stability in permanent housing.” Or so they say. How much of the money given to those 100 programs is siphoned directly to the pockets of leftwing activists?
“The organization that only runs a few programs of their own has over 750 employees, primarily dedicated to liasing with their nonprofit partners overseen by highly paid executives, including the CEO of public Va Licia Adams Kellum, who is paid a base salary of $430,000 per year.” Nice work, if you can get it. And that $420K doesn’t include any money that might be kicked back to her…
“According to SalaryCube and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is roughly double the pay of the average CEO for organizations of this size in the private sector.”
“Most of the money entering this program goes to nonprofit partners, but since each of them are contracted for niche roles across dozens of different programs the real work is bogged down an endless siloing of responsibilities and overhead.” No, harvesting the graft to leftwing activists and causes via the overhead is the intended result.
“Even though these are nonprofit organizations, they all want to protect their role so their people can keep their jobs and they frequently get into turf wars over whose responsibility is what. They also don’t have a direct line of communication to one another since all report reporting goes back through the LHSA.”
“The Housing Authority isn’t even the central authority within Los Angeles. Within just this one city, different homeless issues are handled by the LHSA, the chief of Housing and Homeless solutions, county homeless services, the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the federal inter-agency Council of homelessness, in addition to federal, state, city, and local police departments.” The more red tape and bureaucracy, the more palms that get greased.
“A senior adviser on homelessness to Governor Gavin Newsom defended the state of California spending $17.5 billion that much money would have been enough to just pay rent at market rates for every homeless person in the state with around $4 billion left over.”
I think I’m done critiquing this video. Despite having some useful numbers, he’s not looking in the right places. “Addiction” and “mental illness” each receive one mention (besides the counselor accused of identity theft fraud), but no mention of how that’s the primary driver of keeping people on the street, and only one mention of “housing first,” and no analysis of why it’s a disastrous policy. Nor has he looked to see if the principles receiving fund are passing that money on to Democratic candidates and causes.
George Soros has set his sights on Texas yet again.
Newly released campaign finance reports show George Soros in the top ten political donors in Texas.
Texas’ latest campaign finance reports show liberal billionaire George Soros has been pouring money into political action committees rather than funding candidates directly.
Soros contributed a total of $2,562,000 across several PACs between August and December 2023, making him one of the top 10 contributors in Texas.
Receiving over a million dollars from Soros, the Texas Majority PAC boasts the motto “let’s turn Texas blue.” The organization seeks to elect statewide Democrat officials by researching the most effective strategies to accomplish this goal.
Texas Organizing Project PAC received a quarter of a million dollars from Soros. Placing their mission’s emphasis on black and Latino voters, TOP focuses on reaching the minority communities in Texas to shift the state’s political leaning. However, TOP has also been linked in recent years to bailing out hundreds of inmates with severe criminal records.
After TOP was linked to Soros in the past, former candidate for Harris County Judge Alexandra Mealer posted on social media, saying “TOP works year around to elect candidates in favor of dismantling the criminal justice system so no surprise on [Soros donation].”
Soros also contributed to the Hidalgo County Democrat Party, which aims to emphasize elections at all levels rather than only those on a larger scale.
CTX Votes, Dallas County Democratic PAC, Cameron County Democratic Party Executive Committee, and Planned Parenthood Texas Votes PAC all listed Soros as a top contributor, with CTX Votes and Cameron County receiving over 94 percent of their total contributions from Soros.
In addition, Soros was in the top 10 contributors for both First Tuesday and the Texas Justice & Public Safety PAC.
One particularly interesting race is that for Harris County DA, where’s backing a primary challenger to incumbent Kim Ogg, whom he had previously supported.
Vying for her third term as Harris County district attorney, Kim Ogg faces a challenge in the Democratic primary from a former prosecutor who is backed by Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and groups funded by billionaire criminal justice reform donor George Soros.
Ogg’s challenger, Sean Teare, worked for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) until February of last year, most recently as head of the Vehicular Crimes Division. After announcing his candidacy, his campaign raised $785,000 in the first six months of 2023, while Ogg trailed behind at $56,000. According to the most recent campaign finance reports, Ogg took in $282,000 compared to Teare’s $279,000 in the second half of the year.
Official campaign finance reports also show that Teare is receiving assistance from the Texas Justice and Public Safety PAC, a political action committee that has received most of its funding directly from Soros. The PAC, which previously supported the campaigns of Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza and Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, provided polling services to Teare.
Teare’s reports also show coordination with the Texas Organizing Project, a criminal justice reform group that often posts bail for suspects and supports candidates who will work to end the cash bail system.
On the campaign trail, Teare has criticized Ogg for “weaponizing the DA’s office” against political opponents.
After an investigation into an alleged bid-rigging scheme for a COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract in 2021, a Harris County grand jury issued felony indictments for three of Hidalgo’s staffers, which Teare and Hidalgo have blamed on Ogg.
A day after news broke in November 2023 that the Texas Rangers had issued new search warrants related to the case, at a press conference Hidalgo accused Ogg of leaking the warrants to the media. She also used the press conference, which took place on county property and was live-streamed on the Office of the County Judge’s official social media accounts, to announce her support for Teare, which drew a new criminal complaint and an ethics complaint against Hidalgo.
For more on ethics complaints against Hidalgo, see here. And here. And here. And here. And here.
In an interview with FOX 26 Houston this week, Ogg lambasted Teare for not revealing that after leaving his post at the HCDAO he went to work for the Cogdell Law Firm, which represents Hidalgo’s indicted former staffer Alex Triantaphyllis. According to Ogg, Teare was still a senior staffer at the HCDAO at the time prosecutors were building the cases against Hidalgo’s staff.
“The notion that I should turn a blind eye simply because it was committed by a Democrat is not just offensive. It’s dangerous,” said Ogg.
That is, in fact, exactly what Soros-backed social justice tools expect
Teare’s campaign website features Hidalgo’s endorsement along with those of state Rep. Gene Wu (D-Houston) and a group of Harris County Democratic Party (HCDP) precinct chairs.
On the Republican side, Dan Simons seems to be running for DA, but his campaign doesn’t have a website up yet. An odd decision, since he filed fr the race over a month ago and primary day is less than two months out.
Having seen the devastating toll letting a Soros-backed DA run your county has taken on Harris County thanks to high levels of violence from criminals put back on the street, you would think the Harris County GOP would be doing more to make sure it doesn’t happen again…
Trump wins Iowa (and picks up Ted Cruz’s endorsement), Democratic party popularity becomes ever more selective, Hunter Biden’s laptop confirmed as Hunter Biden’s laptop (not that we ever had any doubt), two shithole countries exchange airstrikes, and a science fiction legend dies. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Donald Trump won the Iowa Caucuses in convincing fashion, winning 51% of the vote. Ron DeSantis came in second with 21%, and MSM-and-Never Trump darling Nikki Haley pulling in 19%, and Vivek Ramaswamy a distant 4th with 7.6%. (Ramaswamy then endorsed Trump.) The most satisfying part of this result is seeing the Hindenburg of Haley puffery crash and explode.
Ted Cruz has endorsed Trump. “‘I’m a big believer in letting democracy play out,’ Cruz said. ‘I’ve got to say Trump’s victory was across the board. He won 51 percent of the vote. He won 98 of the counties. Congratulations to President Trump on that dominating victory.'” Despite DeSantis many strengths as a governor, he did not run a good campaign. And remember, Cruz actually beat Trump in Iowa in 2016, and ran a competitive campaign into May. That’s not going to happen this year. Trump seems likely to win all the primaries in every state.
A Gallup poll released on Friday reveals that a record low percentage of Americans who identify as Democrats in 2023 hit a record low, when independent ‘leaners’ are excluded.
Just 27% of Americans self-identify as Democrats, the smallest figure in the party’s history according to the survey. That said, self-identifying Republicans also hit 27%, though it did not mark the lowest figure in the party’s history – which was in 2013 when just 25% of Americans identified as such. The previous low for Democrats was in 2017 and 2015 at 29%.
Independents, meanwhile, take the cake – with 43% of Americans identifying as such.
Not that any of us ever had any doubt, but DOJ confirmed that the “Laptop from Hell” is in fact Hunter Biden’s laptop, and that they knew that all along:
‼️ In a new court filing today, the DOJ confirms Hunter Biden’s laptop is real, that he left it at a computer store, and that the contents matched what they obtained from a search warrant of his iCloud. Don’t hold your breath for a retraction from Joe Biden (“It’s a Russian… pic.twitter.com/xSZ2YG8JIB
Things that make your blood boil: “Texas man arrested in connection with videos showing seven men who sexually assaulted toddlers at a public mall.”
A Texas man is in federal custody after the FBI linked him to videos from the dark web depicting group sexual assault on toddlers in a mall.
Arthur Hector Fernandez, 29, was arrested Dec. 18, 2023 in Kingwood, TX as the result of a Dec. 14 criminal complaint filed in federal court in Houston, records show.
The FBI were led to Fernandez as a suspect after viewing videos of an assault of a three-year-old child; a relative of the child “recognized the bracelets an individual in the video was wearing as belonging to Fernandez.”
The executive director of the Rainbow Resource Center, a prominent LGBTQ+ support center based in Modesto, has been identified as one of 17 men apprehended on suspicion of attempting to engage in sexual activities with a minor.
The revelation was first reported by the Modesto Bee.
Gerad Slayton, 42, was taken into custody during a sting operation organized by the Turlock Police Department, targeting individuals believed to be seeking illicit encounters with minors. Slayton, recently appointed as the executive director of the Rainbow Center, a local nonprofit dedicated to providing resources for LGBTQ+ individuals across all age groups, faces allegations of pursuing sexual activities with minors.
Rape kits that should have been analyzed by the NYPD but were left in storage at hospitals across the city are now part of a sprawling Department of Justice probe into the department’s Special Victims Division, The Post has learned.
The revelation comes after The Post revealed the snafu, which meant that an unknown number of cases were not fully investigated, victims didn’t get justice, and countless rapists could be roaming free.
Pakistan and Iran have traded airstrikes in each other’s territory. “The unprecedented attacks by both Pakistan and Iran on either side of their border appeared to target Baluch militant groups with similar separatist goals. The countries accuse each other of providing a haven to the groups in their respective territories.”
The Disney magic seems to extend everywhere. “Pixar is planning on MAJOR layoffs this year, up to 20% of employees could be dismissed.” Under Jobs it made money hand over fist, but after Disney went woke it’s produced one flop after another.
Speaking of layoffs, Sports Illustratedlays off everybody. Wait, you mean putting fat women and trannys on the cover of your swimsuit issue and fluffing Colin Kaepernick weren’t tickets to success? Who knew?
Science fiction legend and personal friend Howard Waldrop died over the weekend. Howard was one of the greatest short story writers the field has ever produced. Since you can’t make a living from short stories, Howard was never far from penury, and he spent six months living in a spare room in my house. Pretty much everyone in the field loved him, and he will be missed.
Since there’s not enough reporting of the negative case, I just wanted to report that power is not out in Austin right now.
A powerful cold front (that much talked-about “polar vortex”) rolled into the state over the weekend and dropped temperatures here in central Texas into the high teens. Anyone who remembers the ice storms of 2021 and 2023 knows that this is potentially a recipe for widespread power outages.
Likewise, the state outage map shows no widespread outages, with the biggest being some 8,000+ customers (among 2,000,000+) for Oncor (Dallas Metroplex).
Maybe ERCOT was better prepared this time. Or maybe it was the fact this system didn’t bring nearly the amount of freezing rain and snow we saw in 2021 and 2023. Or maybe it’s just the widespread arboreal destruction we saw in 2021 and 2023 means that the overwhelming majority of trees and limbs likely to take out power lines have already been cleared out.
In related news, HEB was supposedly picked clean of the usual emergency staples (bread, milk, etc.) this weekend, but in my trip today, the bread aisle was mostly full, with just a few empty shelf spots, and the rest of the store seemed similarly well-stocked. (Save the cheese and luncheon meat case, but a sign said that was a freezer issue.)
Here in Austin, it’s supposed to be in the teens until midweek, then fluctuate between just above to just below freezing through the weekend. here’s hoping the power stays on all through that.
And here, for prepping and filthy lucre purposes, is my most recent prepping supply list.
Superman gets tired of Iran’s catspaws tugging on his cape, the Biden Recession has both inflation and budget deficits soaring, another polar vortex barrels down on Texas, and the crazy-eyed girlfriend of a corrupt Democrat shows up on the Epstein list. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen just had to keep fucking around, so now they’ve found out.
The U.S. and Britain launched air strikes in Yemen on Thursday in response to the Iran-backed Houthis’ recent attacks against vessels in the Red Sea.
The strikes came hours after White House national-security spokesman John Kirby called on the Houthis to “stop these attacks” and warned that the group would “bear the consequences for any failure to do so.”
The militants have launched 27 attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since November 19, the U.S. military said earlier on Thursday. The group says the attacks are in protest of the Israel–Hamas war.
The retaliatory strikes targeted a source of the group’s attacks, Bloomberg News reported, noting that heavy explosions were seen in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and the port city of Al Hudaydah. The attacks were carried out with support from Australia, the Netherlands, Bahrain, and Canada, while the U.K. contributed aircraft.
President Biden confirmed the strikes in a statement on Thursday evening, explaining that the action was “in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea — including the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history.”
“These attacks have endangered U.S. personnel, civilian mariners, and our partners, jeopardized trade, and threatened freedom of navigation,” he said, noting that more than 50 countries had been impacted by the attacks on commercial shipping, while crews from more than 20 countries have been threatened or taken hostage in acts of piracy.
“More than 2,000 ships have been forced to divert thousands of miles to avoid the Red Sea — which can cause weeks of delays in product shipping times. And on January 9, Houthis launched their largest attack to date — directly targeting American ships,” Biden said.
Suchomimus has taken a break from his Ukraine war work to do a video on the strike:
Plus another one on the locations hit:
Is there a Habitual Linecrosser video for this strike? Yes, yes there is:
The Biden Recession bites even deeper, with higher inflation and record food prices. And those are just the official numbers. Food inflation seems a hell of a lot higher than official numbers are letting on…
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis appointed a former romantic partner to lead the prosecution against the former president and his associates, a former Trump campaign official and co-defendant alleged in a court filing late Monday.
“The district attorney and the special prosecutor have been seen in private together in and about the Atlanta area and believed to have co-habited in some form or fashion at a location owned by neither of them,” the court document submitted by Michael Roman’s legal representatives argues. Roman served briefly as a special assistant and researcher to President Trump.
The submission does not offer any explicit proof of the DA’s connection to special prosecutor Nathan Wade, but instead claims “sources close to both the special prosecutor and the district attorney have confirmed they had an ongoing, personal relationship.” Wade was paid over half a million dollars throughout his involvement in the Trump election-interference case, which Willis has overseen and authorized.
How long until the radical left argues that it’s perfectly normal with elected black female Democrats like Fani Willis and Kamala Harris to commit adultery with other Democrats to further their career, and it’s just those right-wing troglodytes who are hung up over it?
It’s a problem in the western world that is rarely discussed in the media beyond puff-piece articles and glancing polls that avoid connecting the dots. The precipitous decline of dating, committed relationships and marriage along with a flatline in population in the past couple decades in the US is treated as a novelty issue rather than the threat to the stability of civilization that it actually is. History shows that without the traditional family structure, numerous ugly societal consequences follow.
One could argue, though, that the situation is far worse than that. We may be heading into a future where families become a novelty, and many argue that the root cause is feminism and the hyperinflated delusions of progressive women.
In order to understand the problem we have to look at the stats.
More than 50% of American women are still childless by age 30. By age 35 fertility goes into steep decline with women having a 15% chance of becoming pregnant, and a less than 5% chance of motherhood at age 40. Meaning, the best window of opportunity for women to find a compatible partner and build a family is in their 20s.
Feminists argue, though, that this is the time in a woman’s life when they should be building a career and having fun. Family life, they say, is an artificial prison “created by the patriarchy” in order to oppress the fairer sex. Corporate media and Hollywood entertainment often reinforce this narrative and encourage unrealistic life goals.
The propaganda has generated what many refer to as the “Female Happiness Paradox.” Surveys show that increased power, job access and responsibility for women in society since the 1970s has also led to a diametrically opposed decline in overall happiness for those same women. The correlation suggests the exact opposite of what feminism originally promised and that the ideology has been a net negative.
Though some will argue that a general decline in economic conditions is the real cause, surveys show that women have suffered a far more pronounced drop in happiness compared to men. Meaning, men were already acclimated to the struggles of the workaday world and their roles as providers and protectors. Women were happy until they joined men in the trenches.
For men, the reaction has been to back away from the dating scene and the double standards involved. Over 63% of men under the age of 30 are now single; that’s up from 51% in 2019. The majority of single men say this is by choice and that they are seeking to avoid relationships altogether. Why? The consensus appears to be that modern western women cost too much money and cause too much trouble.
Fear of failed marriage is one aspect that has the younger generation of men on edge, with family courts still largely in favor of women in divorce settlements and child custody. This is one reason why marriage rates have declined by 60% since the 1970s. However, the obstacles go well beyond divorce and into a new culture of female entitlement.
The word on the street is “Hoeflation”: The dramatic increase in cost for men today to maintain a relationship with a woman while the quality of women continues to go down. That is to say, it is an increase in female expectations vs what they bring to the table in a relationship.
In other words, women of the past used to have something to offer beyond sexual companionship, from greater femininity, greater potential for motherhood, less combativeness and narcissism, as well as a superior ability to raise children and maintain a home. Such traits are highly attractive to men even after 60 years of widespread feminism, but are seen as non-existent among women under 30 in 2023.
It should be noted that “Hoeflation” seems to be directly linked to progressive influences, and not all women fall into this category. Unfortunately, around 71% of young women identify with progressive beliefs, as opposed to young men who are only 53% progressive. It should also be noted that progressive today means something a lot different from what it meant in the 1990s (progressive now means woke, or extreme leftist cultism).
Terrified journalists being forced to kneel in a TV studio by gunmen pointing high-powered weapons at their heads as the cameras rolled, police officers pleading for their lives after being kidnapped on duty.
The scenes which have unfolded in Ecuador show the extent to which this once peaceful haven in Latin America has descended into violence.
Snip.
Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, has ordered the armed forces to restore order in the country after days of unrest which saw two gang leaders escape from jail, prison guards held hostage, and explosive devices set off in a number of cities across the country.
In the most dramatic attack, a group of armed men forced their way into the studios of TC Television in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, and tried to force one of the presenters to read out a message live on air.
The gunmen were eventually overpowered by soldiers and have been arrested but the live footage of the stand-off between the hooded men and the armed forces while TC staff cowered on the floor has terrified Ecuadoreans.
“Ohio House Votes to Override DeWine’s Veto of Bill Banning Child Gender Medicalization.” An Ohio senate vote on overriding the veto is scheduled for January 24.
Second Amendment victory: ” In Stunning About-Face, 9th Circuit Prohibits California from Banning Concealed Carry in Public Places.”
From the court’s Order Granting Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction:
California will not allow concealed carry permitholders to effectively practice what the Second Amendment promises. [The new law’s] coverage is sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court. The law designates twenty-six categories of places, such as hospitals, public transportation, places that sell liquor for on-site consumption, playgrounds, parks, casinos, stadiums, libraries, amusement parks, zoos, places of worship, and banks, as “sensitive places” where concealed carry permitholders cannot carry their handguns. SB2 turns nearly every public place in California into a “sensitive place,” effectively abolishing the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding and exceptionally qualified citizens to be armed and to defend themselves in public.
Slowly but surely, Bruen is stopping the gun grabbers dead in their tracks.
“Director of ‘Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence,’ Caught With Illegal Guns, Sentenced To Prison…Michael Rodriguez, 49, the now-former director of “Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence” was sentenced to ten years in state prison following his arrest last summer on drug and gun charges.”
Nearly 59,000 registered Pennsylvania Democrats left the party in 2023; that makes more voters than fans needed to fill the capacity of the Franklin Field Football Stadium at the University of Pennsylvania.
Of those nearly 59,000 who left the Democratic Party, 36,950 switched to the Republican party, and 21,644 switched their party affiliation to “other,” the category the Pennsylvania Department of State uses in its data to cover parties such as Green and Libertarian.
“As the Democrat Party tilts further to the progressive left, more historically traditional, working-class families are moving to the Republican Party, both in terms of how they vote and how they’re registered,” conservative political strategist Charlie Gerow told the Epoch Times.
Scary traffic controller incompetence via Instapundit:
Holy smokes this is terrifying. Female Air traffic controller argues with a pilot who’s been flying for 15 years about a landing and says she “googled it” so she’s right and knows best.
DTO is the airport for Denton, Texas, a college town northwest of Fort Worth.
“Georgia Tech researchers claim they have created ‘the world’s first functional semiconductor made from graphene.’ Importantly, the research team’s epitaxial graphene is claimed to be compatible with conventional microelectronics processing methods and is thus a realistic silicon alternative. Moreover, this refined material achieves a desirable band gap for electronics applications and has latent potential for future quantum computing devices.” Higher band gap is necessary for switching a circuit from on to off; it’s what puts the “semi” in “semiconductors.”
Billions of insects are predicted to burst out of the ground in the United States during late spring, in an event which hasn’t happened for more than 200 years.
The red-eyed, winged insects called periodical cicadas, emerge in 13 to 17-year cycles and are completely harmless.
In 2024, two of these groups – called Brood XIII (meaning 13) and Brood XIX (19) – are predicted to burst from the ground together for the first time since 1803.
The US states of Wisconsin and Illinois will be mainly affected as billions of the bugs making a loud clicking noise will fill the air, cover branches, sign posts and pavements for about a month later this year.
Interesting how the BBC feels it has to explain what Roman numerals mean…
“Three Austin Police Department (APD) SWAT officers have been cleared by a Travis County grand jury following a deadly shooting last year.” As well they should be. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Another day, another machete wielding lunatic keeping Austin weird. Steve Adler may be out of office, but his legacy lives on…
The Texans host a playoff game tomorrow after winning three games each in the previous two seasons. But ESPN hates rookie quarterback phenom C. J. Stroud giving all the glory to God.
Nick Saban retires. That’s a lot of turnover among legendary winners in one week…
Echo: “When it comes to casting roles like this, you usually have to choose between fighters who can’t act, or actors who can’t fight. But unfortunately, Alaqua Cox can’t seem to do either…Because she can’t speak, she really needs to sell the performance with her body language and facial expressions. The problem is, she doesn’t seem to have any.”
