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).
British Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has vowed that police have his full support in taking on “extremists” as anti-mass migration protests and riots have broken out across the United Kingdom following the mass stabbing at a children’s dance party in Southport earlier this week.
Facing a full-blown crisis less than one month into office, recently elected leftist Prime Minister Starmer gathered top cabinet ministers on Saturday as unrest erupted in dozens of towns and cities throughout the UK, in many cases in typical Labour Party strongholds in the north of England, in response to the slaying of three young girls and the stabbing of eight others, including children, allegedly by a 17-year-old Rwandan-heritage second-generation immigrant on Monday.
The Guardian, citing the far-left Hope Not Hate organisation, reported that an estimated 35 locations had been scheduled to see protests on Saturday, some of which saw violent clashes between participants and the police, as well as attacks on businesses, particularly in Belfast, Hull, Liverpool, and Manchester. According to The Telegraph, at least 90 arrests were made throughout the country on Sunday.
Snip.
The prime minister’s response to his first crisis of his expected five-year term has been heavily criticised by the Reform UK party of Nigel Farage, who accused Starmer of failing to address the root cause of the anger, which is mass migration.
On Friday, Farage’s deputy, Boston and Skegness MP Richard Tice, said: “Many millions of concerned British citizens are furious at lawless Britain. Children being slaughtered. Machete mobs abound. Soldiers being stabbed. Police violently attacked in airport.
“Instead of empathy, Keir Starmer labelled folk as “far-right”. Out of touch, clueless.”
As Farage put it a month ago, “Something is going very, very wrong with the country.”
He rails against the social justice push to paint the history of the UK as a merely a long story of oppression (sound familiar?), and the radical increase in crime that recent immigration policies (including those under ostensible “conservative” governments) have brought to the UK, and notes that crime used to be concern of the middle class and elderly, but now is a worry of the young as well, who get assaulted when going out to concerts and events at night. “The answer, of course, to that is a completely different, less woke approach to policing.”
We’ve accepted absolutely, since the late 1940s, that immigration into Britain can be a good thing. Certainly the choice of food in most of our towns is rather better as a result of it. But what has happened over the course of the last 25 years is something entirely different. It is mass migration on a level that in fact begins not just to divide and damage communities, and potentially to set people apart from each other, which is dangerous. But also, I think, a feeling that perhaps something about our culture is directly under threat. That sense of who we are. and that this is a problem. Just think about the numbers. You know Tony Blair came to power…Teddy Blair comes to power and opens the door, and bear in mind for the previous 50 years, net migration had been 30—40,000 a year, that’s what it had been for 50 years. Tony Blair comes to power and opens the door, and net over his premiership 2.7 million people come. And the conservatives accelerate it, because now nearly 4 and a half million have come since they came to power.
Just as in the United States, UK residents have been subjected to boiling the frog, using high immigration levels to change the character of the country.
Much like our froggy friends, the British people are being gradually induced into a dangerous “new normal”, in which criminality, disorder, and personal tragedy are part and parcel of life in this country. As a result of our failed policies on crime, immigration, and integration over the past thirty years, we have gradually transitioned from one of the world’s safest societies to a country in which criminality is the norm. There is a risk that the public becomes used to this new reality, and stops expecting politicians to address the root causes of disorder.
Rather than reacting to the slow drip-feed of news stories on an individual basis, it can be informative to step back and take a holistic view. In just the past few weeks, the headlines have been dominated by events which, in the aggregate, point to a precipitous decline in public order.
On July 11th, the new Labour government announced that 5,000 prisoners would be released early, in order to ease prison overcrowding. On July 15th, reports emerged that London’s once-great Metropolitan Police had failed to solve a single burglary, phone theft, or car theft in 166 London neighbourhoods over the past three years. On July 17th, a Jordanian refugee who attacked a female police officer in Bournemouth was spared community service on the grounds that he could not speak English — and on July 18th, two asylum seekers from Egypt who stole a watch worth £25,000 in London’s West End were spared jail.
That same day saw two separate cases of rioting. In the Harehills area of Leeds, police were attacked and a double-decker bus was set on fire by local residents after four Romani children were taken into care by social services. In East London’s plurality-Bangladeshi borough of Tower Hamlets, rioting broke out in response to political unrest in Bangladesh.
Let me stress this again — all of these incidents took place within the space of a single week. In years gone by, each of these high-profile incidents would have dominated national attention, and provoked a conversation about the state of law and order in this country. Today, they’re little more than fodder for the 24-hour news cycle, as fleeting as stories about vapid celebrity drama or tiresome political rigmarole.
The list goes on. July 23rd, Anjem Choudhary is charged with directing an Islamic terrorist group. July 24th, British cadets at an Army Barracks in Gillingham are told not to wear uniforms in public after an officer is targeted and stabbed. July 26th, protests break out after police in Greater Manchester are recorded restraining two brothers seen fighting passengers at Manchester Airport. July 27th, six people arrested after a drive-by shooting in Watford. July 29th, one man dead and two others injured after a knife fight in East London. July 30th, a machete fight breaks out in Southend and protestors take to the streets in Southport following a brutal knife attack at a ballet school, which killed three girls and injured eight others.
As anybody familiar with the sorry decline of South Africa will be able to attest, decline is a process, not a moment. It consists of thousands of individual incidents, system failures, and personal tragedies. When ordinary citizens become accustomed to high levels of violence and criminality, it becomes harder to address the underlying causes of those issues. Adaptation, rather than prevention, becomes the name of the game — gated communities and private security for those who can afford it, atrophying police capacity for those who can’t.
Restoring the kind of high-trust, stable society that we once enjoyed will be a slow, long process — but it is a process which begins with a restoration of law and order. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele demonstrates that, even while implementing misguided policies such as price controls, a country can still achieve stability and growth if it can maintain law and order. This simple principle gives businesses the confidence to prosper, ensures a harmonious public realm, and gives ordinary citizens — particularly women — peace of mind as they walk the streets.
The Muslim child rape gangs in Rotherham and Oxfordshire should have been huge warnings to how unlimited, unassimilated Muslim immigration into the UK was dangerously destroying the rule of law and social cohesion, but evidently not.
America may not (yet) have Muslim rape ranges, but we certainly have high levels of unassimilated immigration destroying law and order and social cohesion. A course correction to secure the border is badly needed.
I hope you survived Independence Day will all your digits intact! Slow Joe’s poll numbers plumb new depths, everyone knows the media is complicit in hiding his mental decline, Israel settles all family business, Rishi’s snap election is a debacle for the Tories, Wall Street looks to get the hell out of the Rotten Apple, and California legalizing weed was a big win…for illegal weed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Voters that say Biden has the mental health to be President: It was only 35% pre-debate, look where it’s dropped to now post-debate, 27%.
How ’bout that he should be running for President? It’s 37% pre-debate, it’s now 28%…
I have never seen numbers this bad for an incumbent president during my lifetime … These numbers looked NOTHING like this in 2020. These numbers were bad already … they have gotten considerably worse even in just a few days after that first presidential debate.
How bad is Biden doing? This should come with the standard Instapundit “don’t get cocky” disclaimer, as well as a disclaimer that I haven’t examined this guy’s methodology and model at all, but even if the margins are half what he’s saying, it’s still really, really bad for Biden.
As in “Biden is winning Illinois…by three points” bad. New York is within striking distance for Trump. And right now he’s even edging Biden in New Jersey. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Biden says that no one is pushing him out of the race, though even Lightbringer McLegTingle himself has reportedly joined the chorus of concern over Slow Joe’s debate meltdown.
According to ‘several people familiar with his remarks,’ and perhaps most notably conveyed via the Washington Post, not only has Obama grown more concerned following the debate (and having to physically guide the 81-year-old off of a stage last month), the former president “has long harbored worries about his party defeating Donald Trump in November, repeatedly warning Biden in recent months about how challenging it will be to win reelection.”
Not only that, “Just before the debate, Obama conveyed to allies his concerns about the state of the race.”
So Obama gets to save face, while adding to the growing chorus of Democrats who have expressed everything from quiet panic to public hints, to outright calls for Biden to drop out of the race.
Usual “sources close to” caveats apply.
The mainstream media is shocked, shocked that Democrats lied about Biden’s cognitive decline as they actively aided and abetted them.
If you’re looking for a broader takeaway from all this, take how the press covered up Biden’s infirmity because it wanted to protect the Democrats, and apply it to literally every single thing that it does, on any topic, in any year, in any circumstance, forever.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 3, 2024
They all knew:
Now that all the liberal journalists are claiming they didn't try to cover up Biden's deteriorating mental condition, here's a supercut of them claiming any and all damaging videos of Biden are fake and/or deceptively edited. pic.twitter.com/XI5zeTGih5
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) July 3, 2024
Democrats decided to shut Joe Biden down for a week. Not because they wanted to, but because they figured they had to. It was the only chance Biden had — thin as it turned out to be — to get through a 90-minute session in which he’d be asked questions he couldn’t answer with note cards, in which he’d be challenged vigorously and need to be quick on his shuffling feet.
Here’s the thing, though. What we saw on Thursday night was the result of that week of preparation and rest. And it was a disaster. So . . . what must the prep have been like?
Biden’s closest aides and the top Democrats with whom they are in constant communication know better than anyone in America that the president cannot function, that he cannot do the job. Yet, rather than ease Biden out, invoke the 25th Amendment if he wouldn’t go voluntarily, and ensconce in the Oval Office the vice president they insisted in 2020 would be ready to take over if the octogenarian collapsed, they decided they had to try to drag Biden across the finish line.
Why?
Because the Democratic Party is a trainwreck.
As catastrophic as Biden is in his senescence, he remains useful cover for the fact that the youth, energy, and money in the Democratic Party is woke-leftist, Islamist, counter-constitutionalist, post-American, and unelectable.
This doesn’t mean the whole Democratic Party is that way. But it does mean that sensible Democrats have to mind their tongues and genuflect in the crazies’ direction if they want to remain viable. They may personally believe, like the majority of Americans believe, that the border needs to be secure; that we can’t allow millions of illegal aliens a year to enter the country; that we don’t want boys and men invading the formerly safe spaces of girls and women; that mere statistical racial disparities in outcomes do not establish racism; that crime — especially recidivist crime — is a serious problem; that we need to back Israel’s wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian patrons; that a radical “green energy” transition the country is not ready for weighs too heavily on the budgets of everyday Americans even as it drives the national economy deeper into the ditch; and that America, warts and all, is fundamentally good — rightly, the envy of the world. But woe betide the Democrat who gives voice to such commonsense views.
Democrats have thus rolled the dice with Biden, and with the nation’s security, because the alternative is dealing with that rift.
Joe Biden is a lifelong mediocrity. But he has the fortuity of being both a Democrat from another era and Obama’s vice president. Because he’s a doddering blank slate, Democrats of all camps could project onto him their kind of Democrat. He could run in 2020 as the guy who could face down the radicals, and then govern under the thumb of the radicals — but with enough rhetorical feints to the old establishment Dems that they might yet rally around him . . . especially with no alternatives except the hard left and Donald Trump.
Why Joe Biden? Because Democrats want to stay in power and propping him up, as impossible as that has now become, seemed to be the best plan. Sadly, it may yet be.
Unemployment is at a three year high. And those are just the official figures. The truth is probably far worse.
Rigging the 2020 election through Zuckerbucks. “(a) tax-exempt non-profits are prohibited by federal law from engaging in partisan political activity, and (b) the Zuckerberg-funded ‘cabal’ had no other purpose except to guarantee Biden’s election.” And it did this through get-out-the-vote efforts exclusively in heavily Democratic precincts.
If you look at the Livemap, Israel also seems to have stormed various towns in the West Bank this week.
Israel may be in a “settle all family business” sort of mood…
“National Education Association members will vote on several anti-Israel resolutions at the union’s annual ‘Representative Assembly’ in Philadelphia this week, including the adoption of an official position holding that Israel is conducting a ‘genocide’ in Gaza and that opposing the Jewish state’s existence is not antisemitic.” I’m sure they’d rather focus on Gaza than undertake radical courses of action like teaching kids to read.
Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave Desert. Four of the men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.
Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead, the legal market has failed, and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.
California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently, as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado, whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.
Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it’s a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homelessness, drug overdoses and law enforcement.
While the legal drug business is also collapsing in California, the state is spending a fortune fighting marijuana even as it tries to tax it. Gov. Gavin Newsom paradoxically promised to close the budget deficit with $100 million in drug revenue, meant to be used to fund law enforcement and fight substance abuse. The state seized over $300 million in illegal pot this year and uses satellite imagery and heavily-armed raids to fight untaxed marijuana.
But despite all those efforts, illegal marijuana has won and legal marijuana has lost.
The Los Angeles Times warned two years ago:
“Proposition 64, California’s 2016 landmark cannabis initiative, sold voters on the promise a legal market would cripple the drug’s outlaw trade, with its associated violence and environmental wreckage.
“Instead, a Los Angeles Times investigation finds, the law triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never before witnessed.
“Rogue cultivation centers like Mount Shasta Vista now engulf rural communities scattered across the state, as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the steep mountains on the North Coast, and the high desert and timberlands of the Sierra Nevada.
“Residents in these places describe living in fear next to heavily armed camps…”
Some of the growers are private citizens, but they aren’t likely to remain in business for long.
Cartels and gang members dominate the business. And open borders allowed them to bring massive numbers of laborers to boost their ranks. Not only California, but places as far afield as Maine that have large open areas and limited law enforcement resources, have been overrun by drug operations that more closely resemble parts of Latin America and Asia than the USA.
The coasts, from Southern California up to Oregon, are controlled by Mexican cartels which have expanded so much that they’re running short of workers even during the Biden open borders boom. Some have taken to brazenly advertising for illegal workers in Europe.
A local California DA described “Mexican cartel groups coming up to grow pot, and people from Bulgaria, France and Russia.” The vast exodus across the border has made it possible for cartels to freely bring in any workers they want, even as drug legalization and open borders effectively ended any real penalties for either illegal migration or marijuana.
Asian organized crime may be less on the radar, but it is no less ruthless or violent.
A few years ago, four Chinese people were murdered at an Oklahoma illegal pot farm. Chinese organized crime had “taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” the head of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs revealed.
Once again, “the mafias set their sights on Oklahoma when the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes.” Now the Triads run their own compounds “ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes” with 3,000 illegal grows having a value estimated at as high as $44 billion a year.
The Triads are not just in the illegal marijuana business, they traffic in everything from heroin to fentanyl. Legalizing marijuana, however, provided them with a profitable and semi-legal market that gives them a base to expand their efforts trafficking in even more lethal drugs.
Drug legalization has failed on every level. The legal drug business is collapsing. MedMen, which once promised to be the Apple of weed, fell from a $3 billion valuation to a bankruptcy with $411 million in liabilities. Despite the green crosses and online apps, 80% of Californian’s pot is still the old-fashioned illegal kind. Politicians may be boasting about hundreds of millions in revenue, but the cartels are making tens of billions and they’re taking over entire forests.
The future isn’t pot shops, weed apps or MedMen: it’s Mexican and Chinese organized crime compounds that are spreading across the West and parts of New England like a plague.
Also in California, State Farm is jacking home owners insurance into the stratosphere.
State Farm requested massive increases to its California residential insurance rates, which calls its financial stability into doubt amid an ongoing crisis in the state’s insurance market.
The company’s California subsidiary, State Farm General, the state’s largest writer of homeowners insurance, according to the Insurance Information Institute, submitted a request on Thursday to the California Department of Insurance for the following rate hikes:
30% increase in homeowners insurance
336% increase in condominium owners insurance
352% increase in renters insurance
With California’s property insurance market already facing an availability and affordability crisis, driven largely by rising wildfire risk, the timing could hardly be worse.
Gee, maybe you shouldn’t have legalized shoplifting in the name of “social justice.”
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled unanimously in a case involving a 2021 Texas social media transparency law, sending it back to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
House Bill (HB) 20, which requires major social media platforms to be more transparent and prohibit viewpoint-based censorship, passed in the 87th Legislature. It faced an immediate legal challenge, resulting in a temporary block by a federal district court. This decision was appealed to the 5th Circuit, which temporarily lifted the block, allowing the law to take effect.
Justice Elena Kagan delivered the opinion for SCOTUS, writing, “Texas has never been shy, and always been consistent, about its interest: The objective is to correct the mix of viewpoints that major platforms present. But a State may not interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.”
So the Supreme Court will not save Americans from big tech companies teaming up with secret government entities to impose censorship on their platforms. Americans will have to do that for themselves.
The Tories got slaughtered in Rishi Sunak’s spectacularly ill-advised snap election, handing Labour, which seemed on life-support just a few years earlier, a 170 seat majority. “Labour got 3 times as many seats, but did not win – the Conservatives lost, and lost badly, punished by the electorate. Reform were the real winners – although they only got 4 seats.” Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB KC will now become Prime Minister, Sunak is going to go down as one of the Tories worst leaders, and Nigel Farage will finally sit in parliament. Will Labour take this as a greenlight to go full speed ahead on unlimited immigration and hard green NetZero? I wouldn’t put it past them.
Belarus does more sabre rattling on the Ukraine border. I suspect this is just a feint to tie up Ukrainian units on the border, as Putin puppet Aleksander Lukashenko might face a real revolt from his military if he tried to send units into Ukraine.
Remember all that panic over investors buying up housing? Thanks to the Biden Recession, they’re now unloading them at firesale prices. “It’s impossible to make money on mortgage properties with interest rates where they are today.” Well, unless they took out fixed rate mortgages, which real estate companies are evidently loath to do. “Inventory [in this Florida zip code] has gone up 800 to 900%.”
So I thought about doing a post on this Chinese-constructed, Malaysia-based, eco-themed Forest City ghost city just outside Singapore, with the obvious “post apocalyptic” slant, but one thing stopped me: It actually looks kinda cool and well-maintained, and if the usual shoddy tofu dregs building processes have been used, they’re not apparent in this brief tour. Everything looks classy and expensive. And for once, you can’t entirely blame the CCP for the debacle, since the Malaysian government evidently changed foreign ownership rules after most of it had been constructed.
This is a weird story: “Walter Ringfield Jr., the 27-year-old Phoenix resident charged with stealing keys to voting equipment from Maricopa County elections headquarters, has a history of theft allegations – and an apparent interest in running for public office.” He stole keys to a tabulating machine that couldn’t be used without access to other keys he didn’t have for a job he was temping at. Could be a another Democratic attempt at election fraud, or the guy just might be a klepto.
Michigan lawmakers want to make the AR-15 the official state gun. Nice. Texas already has a state gun, the Colt Walker pistol, which is pretty important historically. Tennessee’s official state gun is the Barrett M82, which I think wins the firepower crown, until someone names the Ma Deuce the offical state gun…
It may be a stretch to say that everyone’s favorite bombastic Brit petrolhead-turned-farmer is saving UK farming, but he certainly seems to have drawn attention to its post-Brexit, regulation-strangled plight.
“In 2008, during the peak of Top Gear, Jeremy bought a thousand acres of land and farm called Curdle Hill Farm in Oxfordshire England, near Chipping Norton in the Cotswalds. The land came up for sale during the 2008 financial crash and was going for a lot cheaper than usual. When I say ‘cheaper,’ I mean £4.25 million.”
Clarkson: “The truth of the matter was that land almost never comes up for sale around here, and 2008 was the big financial crash, and this came up for sale, and I just thought ‘nobody’s making more land,’ so many people are moving out from London. But it was a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot less then, so I just thought ‘may as well get it.'”
Also for something to leave to his children, since you don’t pay estate taxes on agricultural land.
The guy Clarkson was paying to farm the land for him retired in 2019. That and Flu Manchu gave birth to Jeremy Clarkson, Novice Farmer and newly rechristened Diddly Squat Farm.
I’m going to skip over the details of his farmhouse renovation…
…and note that the new house has a basement theater, among other amenities, so he’s not exactly roughing it.
“Due to the weather, the farm’s crops brought in £90,000 less than the previous year, leaving them with only a profit of £144.”
“When the show released the following year Clarkson’s Farm became the most watched Prime Video Original Series in the UK.” It’s also been at the top of the ratings heap in the U.S. as well, getting much better ratings than things like The Rings of Power, which has to be something like one or even two orders of magnitude more expensive to film.
Clarkson: “What’s happening to farming in this country is ethnic cleansing. That’s a strong thing to say, but it sort of is happening. The government is trying, really, to drive farmers off their land.”
“In five years, the subsidies, the grants, are stopping, so farms have to think of new ways of making money.”
Another farmer: “Most farmers like me are 66 years old. We’re throwing in the towel. Let’s just take the government money. It won’t be our problem if people starve.”
“We’ve been paid to grow wild flowers. We need to have food produced and made in the UK, but people say well we can import from aboard. The same madness is happening in Europe, they’re asking farmers to plant wild flowers instead of food.” This appears to be done under a Sustainable Farming Incentive program, which offers subsidies for “Flower-rich grass margins, blocks, or in-field strips” and “Herbal leys.”
One of the continuing plotlines on Clarkson’s Farm is how the local council opposes every single one of Clarkeson’s money-making farm enhancements in the name of “tradition,” from a farm shop selling locale produce to a restaurant using the farm’s ingredients. This makes for great TV, but I can only imagine how difficult such a battle would be for a farmer without Clarkeson’s fame and resources.
“Clarkson has done more for the farming community to bring attention to their case with just two seasons than any farming organization has done in decades.”
“Farmers across the world have praised the show for highlighting the struggles they have to go through.”
“The many bases that this show covers is pretty incredible, from animal conservation, bureaucratic jargon, climate change, and just generally detailing how difficult it is to run a farm, especially in these current times.”
“It’s educated the masses about an industry that gets easily neglected, despite its glaringly obvious necessity.”
Someone needs to save farmers, not just in the UK but here as well, from the global warming fanatics who would drive them out of business.
Israel and its coalition partners in the Middle East successfully defended against an unprecedented Iranian attack featuring hundreds of drones and missiles soaring into Israeli airspace.
The Israel Defense Forces said early Sunday morning Iran launched 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles, with over 99 percent of them getting intercepted. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari called the defense “a very significant strategic success” as only a small fraction of them reached Israel itself.
A seven-year-old girl suffered severe injuries from shrapnel that fell directly onto her home. She was rushed to the hospital and underwent emergency surgery for a head wound. An estimated 31 people in total were treated for stress and minor injuries.
The U.S., U.K, France, and Jordan came together with Israel to intercept the onslaught of Iranian drones, according to multiple reports. Explosions could be seen over Jerusalem and other parts of the Jewish state as Israel and its allies defended the Jewish state. Most notably, Israel intercepted Iranian missiles headed towards the temple mount, a holy site for Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Suchomimus is reporting that seven of the missiles that got through, all of which hit Nevatim Air Base.
“Not all of these were launched from Iran. Some of the drones came from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.”
“Around seven missiles [all hit near] Nevatim Air Base. The base is still operational, however. Here is an F-35 landing shortly after the attack, so I expect the damage is actually quite minimal.”
“Some Reports say they actually landed in open areas, missing the key infrastructure.”
The Times of Israel is reporting that airbase, which is home to Israel’s F-35s, appears to have been a primary target in the strike.
While a list of sites Iran tried to hit has not been publicized by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — which launched the drones and missiles — the main target of the attack appeared to be a sensitive airbase in southern Israel, home to the F-35 stealth fighter jet, the military’s most advanced aircraft.
According to the Israel Defense Forces, Iran’s attack comprised 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles — 99% of which were intercepted by air defenses.
All the drones and cruise missiles were downed outside of the country’s airspace by the Israeli Air Force and its allies, including the United States, United Kingdom, Jordan, France, and others — according to the IDF’s top spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.
Though Israel and Jordan have been quietly working together since they signed a peace treaty in 1994, this is the first instance I can recall of Jordanian planes helping protect Israeli airspace.
The drones had a flight time of multiple hours to reach Israel, and the cruise missiles similarly would have taken around more than an hour to reach their target, according to assessments by defense officials.
The ballistic missiles, however, have a much shorter flight time — around 10 minutes — and are more challenging to intercept, and indeed some managed to evade Israel’s air defenses early Sunday.
The IDF said that the long-range Arrow air defense system managed to knock down the “vast majority” of the 120 ballistic missiles. The Arrow 3 system is designed to take out ballistic missiles while they are still outside of the atmosphere.
We’ve talked about Iron Dome, Israel’s short range air defense system, but less about David’s Sling (intermediate range) and Arrow (long range). David’s Sling is a joint venture between Rafael and Raytheon, while Arrow 3 is jointly developed between Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing.
Unlike the drones and cruise missiles, the ballistic missiles were shot down over Israel, leading the IDF to activate warning sirens over fears of falling shrapnel. The sole injury in Israel due to the Iranian attack was a Bedouin girl who was struck and seriously wounded by falling shrapnel in the Negev desert.
Snip.
Most of the sirens warning against the falling shrapnel and ballistic missiles were activated in the central and eastern Negev region of southern Israel, specifically in the area surrounding Nevatim Airbase. Sirens also sounded in the Jerusalem area, the West Bank, and Golan Heights.
A few of the ballistic missiles managed to bypass the Israeli defenses and strike the Nevatim base. According to the IDF, minor damage was caused to infrastructure at the airbase, but it was operating as usual on Sunday morning.
We’ll have to wait for satellite imagery to confirm that, but I suspect it will.
Why are Israeli air defense systems so much better at intercepting missiles and drones than Russia’s is? For one thing Israel’s systems are probably at least 30 years more advanced than Russia’s predominately ancient, predominately Soviet systems. For another, Russia is 779 times larger than Israel.
Right now it appears that Iran’s attack against Israel has been an expensive, colossal failure.
Update: Suchomimus has a new video up that shows minimal damage to the base.
Because the ground invasion wasn’t enough, the Biden Administration has been flying illegal aliens into American cities, wages for Americans are down, San Francisco continues inching toward sanity, some crime news, and Fisker looks farked. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has revealed that the Biden administration has flown at least 320,000 migrants into the United States in an effort to reduce the number of crossings at the southern border, according to Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“The program at the center of the FOIA litigation is perhaps the most enigmatic and least-known of the Biden administration’s uses of the CBP One cellphone scheduling app, even though it is responsible for almost invisibly importing by air 320,000 aliens with no legal right to enter the United States since it got underway in late 2022,” wrote Bensman.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had initially refused to disclose information about the flights, which use a cell phone app, CBP One, to arrange.
“Under these legally dubious parole programs, aliens who cannot legally enter the country use the CBP One app to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those airports. The parole program allows for two-year periods of legal status during which adults are eligible for work authorization,” Bensman continues.
The flights resulted in illegal immigrants being placed in at least 43 American cities from January through December 2023.
Under the terms of their release, migrants are able to remain in the US for two years without obtaining legal status, and are meanwhile eligible for work authorization.
How many Americans realized they were voting for this invasion when they voted for Biden?
A new witness could testify Fani Willis warned lover Nathan Wade’s former business partner to stay quiet about their affair, an explosive new court filing claims.
“They are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us,” Willis is alleged to have warned Terrence Bradley in a September 2023 phone call.
The call was overheard by Cobb County, Georgia, prosecutor Cindi Lee Yeager, according to court papers filed Monday by Trump co-defendant David Schafer.
The tide continues to turn in San Francisco. “‘Progressivism Is Out’: San Franciscans Pass Ballot Measures Requiring Drug Testing for Welfare, Expanding Police Surveillance.”
San Francisco voters who’ve grown tired of the crime, homelessness, and drug use plaguing their left-wing city overwhelmingly approved a pair of ballot measures on Tuesday that will expand police powers and require welfare recipients to be screened for drugs.
Proposition E, which authorizes police to use surveillance equipment — cameras, drones, and even facial-recognition technology — without prior permission from an oversight body, passed with 59,818 votes, or 59.9 percent. The proposition will also loosen restrictions on police chases and require that officers spend less time on paperwork and administrative duties.
Proposition F, which mandates that anyone receiving public-assistance benefits be screened for a substance-abuse disorder, passed with 63,295 votes, or 63 percent.
As part of the proposition, public-assistance recipients found to be drug-dependent could be offered treatment. If it is made “available at no cost, the recipient will be required to participate to continue receiving” public benefits, according to the proposition.
“Progressivism is out—for now,” the San Francisco Chronicles’ website read in bold letters on Wednesday morning, “Voters make it clear: S.F. can no longer be called a progressive city.”
The approval of both propositions was a big win for San Francisco’s embattled mayor, London Breed, who placed both measures on the primary ballot in an effort to tamp down on crime and to take aim at drug addiction and overdose deaths in the city. She told reporters on Tuesday that passage of the two measure will allow her administration to “continue the work we’re doing” to improve public safety, according to the Chronicle.
With San Francisco turning slightly sane, Austin may vie with Seattle, New York and Chicago for the title of America’s Most Insane Radical Leftwing City.
In June 2023, The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas reported that the Indian Health Service (IHS), which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, is collaborating with the ACLU, Demos, and several other left-wing organizations to register new voters. In order to expand the reach of these efforts, the Biden administration designated an Arizona-based Indian Health Service (IHS) facility as an official voter registration hub in October.
According to Arizona Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Native Health of Phoenix, which caters to “urban Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and all other individuals,” will “assist individuals in the voter registration process.” The administration confirmed that the IHS facility would be one of five designated as voter registration sites by the end of 2023.
Much like young voters, Native Americans heavily favor Democrats.
4. Department of Agriculture
The USDA is another federal agency directing its efforts at potential Democrat voters. Earlier this month, emails obtained by The Daily Signal show the agency was colluding with Demos as early as August 2021 to work on turning out voters.
As The Federalist’s M.D. Kittle reported, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service “encourages all state agencies administering the child nutrition programs to provide local program operators with promotional materials, including voter registration and non-partisan, non-campaign election information, to disseminate among voting-age program participants and their families.”
One of the “ideas” recommended by the agency is for “[s]chool food authorities administering the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in high schools, and adult day care centers and emergency shelters participating in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) to promote voter registration and election information among voting-age participants and use congregate feeding areas, such as cafeterias, or food distribution sites, as sites for the dissemination of information.”
Sweden officially became part of the NATO alliance Thursday, two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused the nation to overhaul its non-alignment policy.
Snip.
“It’s official – #Sweden is now the 32nd member of #NATO, taking its rightful place at our table. Sweden’s accession makes NATO stronger, Sweden safer, and the whole Alliance more secure. I look forward to raising their flag at NATO HQ on Monday,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on X Thursday. Hungary ratified Sweden’s ascension into the alliance last week, becoming the final NATO country to do so.
The nordic country applied for NATO membership in May 2022, about three months after Russia began its war in Ukraine. The admission of Finland and Sweden expands NATO to 32 members.
As Peter Zeihan noted, “in the Swedish military, every day you wake up, you prepare for one thing: the war with the Russians.” Good job, Putin!
Blaze Media journalist Steve Baker was arrested by the FBI and brought to a Texas federal courtroom in handcuffs, a belly chain and foot shackles to face four nonviolent misdemeanor charges for being at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021…
“There’s nothing in there about my behavior,” Mr. Baker told The Epoch Times. “It’s all about my words. Everything. It’s all about stuff I said before, stuff I said after, and that’s it. No more complicated than that.”
Mr. Geyer said his client’s arrest shows an “unprecedented shift in Department of Justice policy [after it] had spent decades adhering to special protections for journalists.”
Speaking of people who shouldn’t be getting taxpayers subsidies, Harvard “We Hate Jews” University wants $2 billion in taxpayer-backed bonds.
Recall effort against Dallas’ Democrat-turned-Republican mayor Eric Johnson fails. Number of signatures to have a recall election: 103,595. Number of signatures submitted: Zero.
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.
The Black Hornet drone that western nations have supplied Ukraine with has some very interesting tech and capabilities, and is all but invisible to visual and electronic detection. But there’s a catch.
“In Ukraine’s battle for Air Supremacy with Russia, a swarm of tiny black hornet drones might just give it the edge.” I wouldn’t say air supremacy, I would say it’s extending Ukraine’s lead in recon supremacy.
“These drones act as eyes for Ukrainian troops on the ground. And thanks to the US, UK and Norway, Ukraine now has an entire fleet of them ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice.”
“In July 2023, the United States announced that it would deliver $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine. Beyond the typical armored vehicles and air defense missiles, that package would also include Black Hornet drones made by Teledyne FLIR defense. A month later the UK made a similar announcement. Working with Norwegian manufacturers it would spend $9 million on these microdrones, sending them over to Ukraine for use as covert surveillance tools.”
“All told, Ukraine now has over 1,000 of these drones at its disposal, and they’re helping Kiev slowly turn the tide against Putin’s invading forces.” Hopefully, but I think that remains to be seen at this point.
“In Ukraine’s case, they’ve received shipments of the Black Hornet 3, which measures just 6.6 inches from nose to tail, and weighs only 1.16 ounces. In other words they’re tiny. So tiny, in fact, that the,drones are easy to hide among foliage and trees, making them almost imperceptible to opposing troops.”
“Further more, the drones are designed to be practically silent when in operation.”
It’s a tiny helicopter outfitted with several high definition cameras, limited autonomy, a radio range of a bit over a mile, about 25 minutes of flight time (and takes about the same to recharge). It can actually penetrate into buildings and trenches.
I’m skipping over the idea the video floats of these things spying on Russian planes, since the size/speed/distance equation simply isn’t there.
But all these high tech capabilities come at a price: “$195,000 per unit.” You can buy an awful lot of RPG drones for that kind of money…
The drones are not brand-spanking new, and were used in Afghanistan. However, I’ve got to think the Russian’s insistence on extensive defensive fortification are going to make them ideal for the sort of atomized conflicts we’ve seen thus far in the war, and they should be great at spotting targets for artillery and weapons drones.
I can see having one of these per infantry platoon. But the high per-unit costs precludes the idea they discuss of each member of the platoon having one, at least until that cost comes way, way down…
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.”
“Christine Lee she was named by the MI5 back in 2022 as an agent of influence…British Security Service issued an alert earlier this year stating that a UK-based lawyer had been engaged in political interference activities for the Chinese state.”
This marked a shift in approach “being taken against the security threat posed by China.”
“She has personally met with Xi Jinping back in Beijing.”
“This is a bunch of people in a conference room. This is called the political consultative conference. They invite a bunch of people living overseas back to China to get greeted by Xi Jinping for to thank them for their effort in conducting influence operations overseas.”
“It’s also possible that CH Lee doubles as somebody from one of the intelligence bureaus.”
“On the surface she’s a lawyer in the UK, and she is also a political influence campaign, specialist and also she could also be a secret agent doing something even worse.”
“The entire thing started because Christine Lee did not want her face to appear on camera, but she was not able to go up directly to confront Dr K [Brendan Kavanagh], being that she’s publicly known by the MI5 as an agent of influence.”
“I think Dr K needs to be aware that this was not just against a series of random CCP nationalists, he’s actually against a systematically planned out series of influence operations. And this, in my view,escalates the situation entirely. I think he should do something to protect himself, protect his family, and also be aware of who he dealing with. This is not a regular group of people.”
Meanwhile, the Chinese communists are threatening to sue Kavanagh for “defamation.”
The story started out looking like it was just “Little Pinks” acting like assholes in another country, but the truth appears to be stranger and more sinister.
