Harris plagiarizes Wikipedia and blows off Catholics, Gwen Walz assigns America homework, social justice groomers keep trying to trans your kids, Williamson County’s sheriff gets accused of pay-for-play corruption, another Hamas leader eats a last meal of kosher drone, Columbia U wants to silence a pro-Israel professor, and a meat recall expands to my local supermarket.
The Biden-Harris administration announced [last] Friday that it was filing a lawsuit against the state of Virginia for enforcing voter integrity laws in the state that aim to curb illegal voting in elections.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who has a history of espousing racist views, claimed without evidence that Virginia’s move to increase election integrity was an “eleventh hour effort” intended, in part, to “disenfranchise qualified voters.”
The DOJ claimed that it was doing so because it was “too close to the Nov. 5 general election” to remove voters:
Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
However, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order requiring that non-citizens be removed from voter rolls was signed on August 7, 2024 — exactly 90 days before Election Day.
The problem is the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are not, in fact, voters because they are not citizens, said Youngkin.
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said.
Youngkin said that the lawsuit was a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.”
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.
While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences.
Nothing says “commitment to rigorous academic scholarship” quite like not just quoting verbatim from Wikipedia, but doing so incompetently.
Host of Fox News “Special Report” Bret Baier finally snagged that interview with Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris. Harris was campaigning in Washington Crossing, PA and was proud of the former Republicans and Trump administration people who took the stage with her and happy with their endorsement, delighted in their support of her as a presidential candidate.
The entire interview was a train wreck, but there were particular moments that were exceptionally cringeworthy, damaging, and proved with glaring certainty why she is unfit to lead.
Baier started off with the topic of illegal immigration, and you could visibly see Harris deflate like a balloon before the first question was asked.
Immediately Harris tried to filibuster Baier and do this interview’s version of “I’m speaking.” Harris brought up the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which she claimed addressed the flaws in the asylum system with more judges, 15 million more border agents, increased penalties, stemming the flow of fentanyl, shore up entry points, and how she has worked toward bipartisan efforts to strengthen the border.
Baier gently pushed back with documented facts, and Harris briefly got that deer in headlights look she gets when she is desperately trying to find her talking points. Then she jumped on her supposed record as California Attorney General (not her current position as VP) as proof that she knew how to handle this crisis. Failing to understand that the fact that a crisis exists is proof that you have no ability to correct it.
But the most purely evil and damning part of this topic of illegal immigration was the fact that Harris could not even form the words to apologize for allowing criminals into the country that resulted in the senseless deaths of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin.
Former president Donald Trump poked fun at vice president Kamala Harris during the Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, criticizing his political rival for failing to show up at the charity event in person.
Harris addressed the crowd at the white-tie event, which raises funds for Catholics charities, in a pre-recorded video – a highly unusual move for a presidential candidate. It has become a tradition for presidential candidates to speak at the event since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960.
The vice president is the first presidential contender to skip out on the dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984.
There’s an auspicious precedent.
“I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” Trump said.
He went on to joke that Harris must be “out receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” a reference to a viral video from earlier this month of the Michigan governor feeding a chip to a leftist influencer on her knees.
Trump accused the vice president of being “disrespectful to Catholics.”
He also quipped about the Democratic nominee’s odd’s of winning the election, saying, “There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris but I’m not worried about them. Their wives and their wives’ lovers are voting for me.”
Does Kamala Harris need a mea culpa in PA? Or does her disconnect from voters in the Rust Belt go beyond state lines and religion?
That question has rolled around in my head since reading William McGurn’s column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. McGurn uses Gretchen Whitmer’s bizarre mockery of the Catholic Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat to argue that the Democrat anointee for the presidency now has a Whitmer-created problem. But is that entirely true, or does it go beyond Whitmer’s blasphemy?
McGurn recognizes a broader problem, but perhaps not its scope. First, he outlines the direct issues with Catholics, who comprise 30% of Pennsylvania:
As California’s attorney general, Ms. Harris signed several friend-of-the-court briefs opposing religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby and religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She said she was “proud” to have co-sponsored California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices about where women could get an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2018 rejected the law as a likely violation of the First Amendment.
But perhaps Ms. Harris’s most notorious Catholic moment came after she was elected senator. When Brian Buescher was nominated for a federal judgeship, she grilled him about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization. Although President John F. Kennedy was also a Knight, Ms. Harris treated the group as though it were the Ku Klux Klan.
She would later co-sponsor the Equality Act, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops said could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortions they oppose. Last month she snubbed New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan by declining to attend this Thursday’s Al Smith dinner, an election-year staple that has brought Democratic and Republican candidates together in a civil setting for decades.
Those are the direct issues, and those aren’t limited to Pennsylvania. Overall, Republicans now have a statistically significant edge in party ID among Catholics, according to Pew polling this year, 50/44. Nationally, Catholics accounted for 25% of the vote in 2020, although apparently pollsters didn’t include data on religion in state-level exit polling. One can expect a similarly significant number of Catholics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps slightly lower levels in states like Arizona and Georgia. In every state, however, Catholics make up a far larger part of the electorate than the Arab-Americans did in Michigan, and yet both Biden and Harris obsessed over their support all year long.
That’s one problem, but that’s not the only problem. A more recent Pew poll shows Harris trailing Donald Trump with Catholics by five points, even worse than Hillary Clinton performed in 2016. But the issue isn’t entirely religious:
Mr. Biden may be the last of the big-time Democrats whose base was the white working class. But it confers a sensibility Ms. Harris is conspicuously lacking. …
Politico reports that Ms. Harris’s prospects are “considerably dicier” because of a “cultural dissonance” between her progressive San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians.
That gets closer to the real danger for Democrats, but it has less to do with “white” and “Catholic” than it does to working class. Biden had a political and cultural connection to working-class voters, not just because of his Catholicism but because of his background. He fit into that milieu even if that mainly came as a conceit, especially after fifty years in Washington DC, but he could talk in their language too … at least before his brain turned to jelly. People keep overlooking his 2012 address to the Democrat convention, which turned out to be the best of the week, in which he artfully bridged the gap between the working class and the Academia-drenched elite that had mainly taken over the party in the current generation.
Harris simply can’t do that. Not only is she incapable of connecting at anywhere near that level, she only recently even showed a desire to do so. Her lame attempt at repeating the mantra “I was raised in a middle-class household” ad nauseam is about as close as she gets. Culturally, she comes from the Academia-drenched elite and speaks their language, to the extent she speaks any political language effectively at all. Harris tosses around clichés as a means to connect to working class voters, which initially appeared to appeal to them but have turned into a major liability now.
The Democratic Party’s naked contempt for both religious believers and the actual working class has been evident for a long, long time.
More on the subject: “Blowing Off the Al Smith Dinner Might Have Cost Harris Pennsylvania — and the Election.”
The Catholic vote is not as monolithic as it used to be. In 1928, the Catholic vote was overwhelmingly Democratic, concentrated in urban centers. By 1960, the Catholic vote was fracturing through intermarriage and economic issues, but Kennedy still received about 65% of the vote from his co-religionists.
Today, Donald Trump can expect to get about 60% of the Catholic vote. In Pennsylvania, The Catholic vote might be pivotal in a state that Harris absolutely, positively has to win.
“Her San Francisco progressive persona isn’t a good fit for Joe Biden’s native state,” William McGurn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday.
Snip. “In an election in Pennsylvania that will almost certainly be decided by less than 100,000 votes, Harris skipping the Al Smith Dinner was not only stupid but might be the mistake that cost her the White House.” Eh, probably not. Harris will probably lose the election because she’s part of an administration had presided over a wretched economy and let in millions of illegal aliens. Plus she’s a horrible candidate that literally nobody voted for. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Google is up to its old tricks, “hiding Conservative news on election 23 pages deep.””When using the search term “donald trump presidential race 2024,” researchers had to scroll through 23 pages of results before they come to a U.S.-based right-leaning news source, a single Fox News video six results down on the 23rd page.”
An excerpt from the book Walz' wife was reading to children shows them all riding the gay dad while he puts a vacuum cleaner up to his mouth. I'm sure it's nothing. From: Bathe the Cat. pic.twitter.com/2npr5s6mDN
Gwen Walz also seems to feel that the best way to get men to the polls is assigning them homework.
Can you put some really money behind that and put it on air? Maybe during college football?
There are still men out there who don’t hate this campaign with every fiber of their being, and I think this ad could be enough to nag them right into Trump’s arms. https://t.co/vk6jwJY9oM
Yes, social justice warrior teachers do want to trans your kids. “Court Shuts Down BLM Teacher Trying To Force Trans Ideologies On Kids.”
Megan Williams is a first-grade teacher who forced her 6 and 7-year-old students to “observe” so-called Transgender Awareness Day. This Black Lives Matter activist subjected these small children to non-curricular propaganda about “gender identity” and sex changes.
Williams disturbingly went so far as to tell these kids that their “parents ma[d]e a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl” and may have been wrong. Parents complained, but Williams was backed by her school principal and superintendent.
Three mothers fired back by filing a lawsuit against Williams, the school, the district, and district officials in June of 2022. Their goal was to obtain a moratorium “on gender dysphoria and transgender transitioning,” parental notice and opt-out rights on the topic absent such a prohibition, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Thankfully, Judge Joy Conti of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania just ruled largely in favor of these mothers.
Judge Conti stated that “parents have a constitutional right to reasonable and realistic advance notice and the ability to opt their elementary-age children of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics and to not have requirements for notice and opting out of those topics that are more stringent than those for other sensitive topics.”
Here’s the remarks in the aired clip shared by Johnson:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%…The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
And here — I’ll put it in bold — is what CBS edited out for the broadcast:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%, and when I was there on the ground, and you should go, I mean, bring the cameras and talk to the people there, they’ll tell you, don’t- don’t take politicians words for this or the administration’s word, talk to the people there on the ground they had not been provided the resources almost two weeks out from the storm that they desperately needed. And when I was there 13 days, post- you know, post the storm hitting that state, people are still being rescued. They’re stuck in the higher elevations in the mountains because the roads are down and all the rest. So they need every- every available resource and all hands on deck. The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
Issues in the debate ranged from abortion to the border crisis, and allowing boys in girls’ sports.
On abortion, Cruz said he supported Texas’ pro-life laws while acknowledging that other states would make different decisions.
“In Texas, we overwhelmingly support that parents should be notified and have to consent before their child gets an abortion. In Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that late-term abortions in the eighth and ninth months, that’s too extreme. And I’ll tell you, in Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that taxpayer money shouldn’t pay for abortions,” said Cruz.
He went on to attack his opponent’s position on abortion as extreme, noting that Allred “voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental notification law. He voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental consent law. He voted to legalize late-term abortions, including the eighth and ninth months.”
Allred, meanwhile, said he would fight to “restore a woman’s right to choose” and to “make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again.”
Snip.
One of the biggest issues playing out in the campaign thus far has been Allred’s position on allowing boys in girls’ sports. The issue has been the target of Cruz’s campaign ads and led to Allred denying the accusations, despite voting against legislation to protect girls sports.
“I know a lot of y’all at home, for example, saw two biological men competing in women’s boxing at the Olympics,” said Cruz. “That was wildly unfair. You know, my youngest daughter plays volleyball. It’s not fair for a biological boy or man, a teenage boy, to spike the volleyball at her, and he has voted repeatedly in favor of that.”
FEMA’s entanglement with the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open southern border policies by diverting storm relief funds ($1.4 billion, according to NYPost) for illegal and legal aliens may have undermined the federal agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies, such as the Katrina-like disaster unfolding in the US Southeast.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dropped the bombshell [two weeks ago]: FEMA “does not have the funds” to see Americans through the rest of this Atlantic hurricane season. The federal agency drained the funds by prioritizing taxpayer funds for illegal and legal aliens versus US citizens as the Biden-Harris globalist team rolled out the red carpet to anyone, even terrorists, via the open southern borders.
Connect the dots, if you can,” Tim Murtaugh, an adviser to former President Trump’s campaign, wrote on X, adding, “DHS says FEMA might not have enough cash to help people through hurricane season. But in 2 years of a new Biden-Harris program, they’ve spent $1 BILLION on housing and other services for migrants.”
Shedding a whole heck of a lot of color on the situation, Savanah Hernandez, a reporter for Turning Point USA, wrote on X that she has uncovered some of the “first looks” inside fully furnished luxury apartments for migrants that received free rent and utilities for two years.
Hernandez wrote in a note on The Post Millennial:
The Brunswick Landing apartments in Maine sparked controversy earlier this year when it was discovered that homeless migrants in the area were getting the opportunity to live in the units rent-free for up to two years. Migrants living in the apartments shared that not only is the rent-free, the utilities are paid and we got an inside look at the furnished apartments that would run the average American about $2,300 dollars.
“FEMA: Disaster Relief No Longer About Emergency Response, It’s About ‘Disaster Equity.'”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposed to be the government’s premier emergency relief organization in times of disaster, like the situation now faced by victims of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath in North Carolina and Tennessee.
But according to the FEMA website, the agency now places higher priority on instituting Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity guidelines than on easing the suffering of Americans displaced by disaster.
Among the goals listed in FEMA’s strategic plan are to:
Instill equity as a foundation for emergency management
Lead whole of community in climate resilience
Promote and sustain a ready FEMA & prepared nation
What does that look like in action?
Here’s an example of a FEMA disaster preparedness meeting where participants discuss how LGBTQIA individuals were suffering disproportionally before the storm compared to other disaster victims.
Notice how the focus shifts from doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people to ensuring that they are promoting “equity in disaster relief.”
Social justice is racist poison that ruins everything, and now it’s costing Americans their lives.
Here we go again. “Report: Migrant Caravans Leaving Southern Mexico Headed Toward US Border.”
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has declared a “blood feud” against three federal lawmakers from neighboring North Caucasus republics in his first comments on last month’s deadly shooting outside the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries.
Kadyrov has vowed to help Vladislav Bakalchuk, the estranged husband of Wildberries CEO Tatiana Kim — Russia’s wealthiest woman — to return his wife and block the merger of their e-commerce giant with the smaller outdoor advertising group Russ.
The family and business dispute escalated last month when Bakalchuk led a group of men to Wildberries’ Moscow offices and allegedly tried to force their way into the building. Two security guards, who were ethnic Ingush, were killed in the shootout and multiple felony charges, including murder, were filed against Bakalchuk and several other ethnic Chechens involved in the incident.
Kadyrov is a piece of work, but one with a sufficiently strong independent power base that Putin has felt compelled to buy him off. Kadyrov declaring a blood fued against Russian officials probably isn’t a sign of harmony in Russia’s government…
Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.
A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.
The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.
The Israelis did not choose the way this war began, but they will be the authors of its conclusion. And the end is near. The Israelis have brought the Gaza Strip closer to its day of liberation from the tyranny of an illegitimate terrorist regime than all the combined efforts of the peace processors in the global diplomatic corps ever achieved. It is a shame that the American administration that stood so stalwartly with Israel at the outset of this campaign willingly sacrificed its ability to celebrate alongside its Israeli counterparts. This should be America’s victory, too. But by spending months on end agonizing over how Israel was achieving its honorable objective, the Biden White House and its allies lost sight of our shared strategic goals.
We hit the Houthis with B-2s. I didn’t have that on my 2024 dance card…
“Williamson County’s Democrat Sheriff Accused of Accepting Pay-to Play Donation. On September 24, the Williamson County Commissioners Court issued a contract for over $500,000 to Family Hospital Management Company for ‘Jail Inmate Psychological Services’. Just four days before a county contract was issued, [Democrat Sheriff Mike] Gleason received a $20,000 campaign donation from the founder and CEO of the company that received the contract.” “Jail Inmate Psychological Services” sounds like a great avenue for leftwing graft…
“A North Carolina Democratic county leader, who is also running for a seat in the state House, was arrested after allegedly stealing Trump signs near a road last week. Moore County, North Carolina, County Chair Lowell Simon, 68, was charged with two counts of misdemeanor larceny of political signs after he admitted to removing Trump signs and keeping them in his car.”
“The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian says she ‘woke up’ after being molested by LA homeless man and ‘the good people’ slammed her for talking about it. Kasparian described feeling “politically homeless” and shared how the backlash she received from liberals after the assault played a key role in her reevaluation.” Seems like social justice warriors feel that being molested by a homeless man or raped by an illegal alien is a small price to pay for taxpayer-subsidized abortion…
Boy dressed as girl assaults actual girl, gives her a concussion and blurred vision. You know what the school administrators did, don’t you? That’s right, they suspended the victim.
“Edgewood ISD Superintendent Gets Raise While Students Are Failing. Edgewood ISD extended Superintendent Eduardo Hernández’s contract until 2029 and raised his annual salary to $291,923.””Only 23 percent of Edgewood ISD students can read, write, and do math at or above grade level.” Edgewood is on the west side of San Antonio.
Columbia U is trying to make their campus Judenfrei.
Columbia University is temporarily suspending a prominent pro-Israel business professor’s access to campus after he publicly criticized school officials for permitting anti-Israel campus demonstrations on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Columbia notified Israeli-American business professor Shai Davidai on Tuesday that he will be banned from campus for violating university policy on harassing school employees.
On Tuesday night, Davidai posted a video on social media accusing Columbia of retaliating against him for posting a video of himself asking Columbia’s chief operating officer Cas Halloway why he allowed pro-Hamas demonstrators to protest on the anniversary of October 7.
“Right now I was supposed to be at the school of social work at Columbia, where the Jewish students are holding their own memorial service for the senseless violence of October 7th. But then I got a call from my lawyer, who says the university has decided to not allow me to be on campus anymore,” Davidai said.
“Why? Because of October 7th. Because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob. And because I was not afraid to expose Mr. f**king Cas Holloway for not doing anything about it.”
Davidai should sue them over equal rights violation for millions. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated toolsets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the Internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.
One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different toolset created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.
The practice of air gapping is typically reserved for the most sensitive networks or devices connected to them, such as those used in systems for voting, industrial control, manufacturing, and power generation. A host of malware used in espionage hacking over the past 15 years (for instance, here and here) demonstrate that air gapping isn’t a foolproof protection. It nonetheless forces threat groups to expend significant resources that are likely obtainable only by nation-states with superior technical acumen and unlimited budgets. ESET’s discovery puts GoldenJackal in a highly exclusive collection of threat groups.
Then there’s this: “The basic flow of the attack is, first, infecting an Internet-connected device through a means ESET and Kaspersky have been unable to determine.” There’s a 99% chance that these air-gaped systems are being attacked through the usual human engineering or security lapse vectors. Which leaves a 1% chance of some form of electromagnetic witchcraft…
“WeightWatchers Squeezes Higher After Unveiling New Low-Cost GLP-1 Treatment…WW announced the addition of a new compounded semaglutide to its lineup to beat America’s obesity crisis sparked by the processed foods industrial complex. The new treatment starts at $129 per month, and each additional month will cost $189. This is significantly less than GLP-1 obesity treatments from big pharma, which cost north of $1,000 a month.”
Fiat/Stellantis merged with Chrysler in 2014, and now they’re threatening to shut it down in two years.
BrucePac listeria meat recall expands, now includes some HEB items.
Disney plans to slash budgets on Marvel movies going forward. On the one hand, that’s probably prudent, since it gets harder and harder to turn a profit with soaring budgets. On the other hand, Marvel’s recent problems aren’t a product of big budgets, they’re a product of wokeness and crappy scripts.
Rick Beato has an interesting video with R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills. I didn’t realize that the other three members wrote the music then handed it off to Michael Stipe, who would go off and create the lyrics by himself.
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).
More evidence of the Biden Recession, California’s welfare state goes extra crazy, Chicago has to spend mad money to produce illiterate children, an Assistant DA resigns, a cyberattack hits car dealers nationwide, a Brazilian thief gets ventilated, and God unites the entire world in hatred of the New York Yankees. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Taxpayers are funding a new high-rise building in Los Angeles where homeless people will enjoy skyline views, a cafe, a gym, and an art studio, not to mention the free rent.
The fancy new building is 19 stories high and has 278 units, each costing about $600,000. The total cost was $165 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. It is the first of three new high-rise buildings that will soon house homeless people.
Snip.
This modern tower for the homeless includes a TV in each apartment, a gym, an art room, a soundproofed music room, a computer room with a library, a TV lounge, a courtyard, and a cafe that will host movie nights. There are also six common balconies, four of which have dog runs.
Where are politicians getting all the money for this project? The buildings are funded by the city’s supportive housing loan program, Proposition HHH, which was approved by city voters in 2016, as well as state housing funds and $56 million in state tax credits.
The three apartment buildings will be located around the headquarters of the Weingart Center, a nonprofit that assists homeless people. Kevin Murray, a former California state senator, is the man behind the project. He serves as the chief executive of the nonprofit.
I’m sure all the Homeless Industrial Complex members involved got generously paid for their efforts. Once again, the message of the Democratic Party is: You’re suckers for working for a living.
Illinois Policy just issued a report showing that while CPS has doubled spending per student since 2012, grades are down by 60-80%, depending on the subject. “Just 1-in-4 CPS students can read or perform math at grade level,” the report says. “The percent of students enrolling in college after high school graduation is decreasing. And for those who do enroll, another study found many are struggling to finish college in four years – just 30% get their bachelor’s in four years compared to 47% nationally.”
By every other measure… there’s no other way to put this… CPS is falling apart.
In 2023, 26% of students in grades 3 through 8 across all of CPS could read at grade level and about 18% could do math proficiently. For 11th grade CPS students, only 22% could read at grade level and 19% do math proficiently.
CPS’ failure to engage students shows in the chronic absenteeism rate. Chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed.
According to ISBE data, 86.3% of teachers in CPS were rated as proficient or excellent in 2023, down from 91.4% in 2019. Yet many students in CPS are struggling to reach proficiency in core subjects.
There’s much more at the link, all of it tragic. An entire generation of Chicago students is failing — and being failed by their schools and, let’s be brutally honest, by their families.
If you’re thinking that CPS must be seriously underfunded to achieve such dismal results, you must have been living in a cave for the last 40 or 50 years. CPS will spend a jaw-dropping $29,028 per student this year. My family lives in a lovely exurb of Colorado Springs and our district spends roughly one-third of what CPS does — $10,214 per student — and we get much better results. It isn’t about the money. It rarely is.
The case began in November 2022, when Loper Bright Enterprises, a fishery based out of Cape May, New Jersey, appealed a district court opinion to the Supreme Court. The conflict between Loper Bright and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) started after the agency decided to require private fisheries like Loper Bright to pay their regulatory inspectors for their time observing fishery practices.
While the law doesn’t explicitly allow this practice, the Fishery Service cites the Chevron Deference, a precedent set by a 1984 Supreme Court case, which states that an ambiguous law can be interpreted by government agencies as they see fit. In short, the Fishery Service wants private companies to pay their salaries and found a legal loophole to justify it.
While this may seem like an isolated incident, it is just one example of a long history of government agencies infringing on individual liberty. The outcome of this case holds supreme importance for the future of our republic and the preservation of our financial and civil freedoms.
Since 1950, the federal government has steadily grown in size. Today, it has over 2.9 million civilian employees, more than Walmart has worldwide. This growth has paved the way for the creation of a governmental pseudo-branch denoted the “administrative state.” The administrative state contains government employees who have a significant impact on people’s everyday lives but yet aren’t held accountable to citizens in the form of elections. These unelected bureaucrats undermine the central ethos of a republic, where elected officials are supposed to seek the good of their constituents or risk not being re-elected.
The problem with this system was made evident during the pandemic. During the COVID shutdown, hundreds of millions of Americans were sentenced to lockdowns, impacting their schools, churches, and families. Many of the people behind this policy were members of the CDC, one of the government agencies that comprise the administrative state. The decisions they made were not subject to the traditional checks and balances which typically constrain the US government. Instead, America found itself under a tyranny of the unelected.
This overreach extends beyond individual liberty into private business. When businesses can be encroached upon at a whim by unelected authorities, long-term investment becomes a much riskier endeavor. When the COVID shutdown occurred, many small businesses, with their small profit margins and high overhead, were unable to weather the storm. For the companies that survived, the blatant government intervention and the severe consequences that followed left a sour taste in their mouth for future capital investments. You’re not going to build a new business if a bureaucrat can shut it down the next day. All of these factors contribute to government agencies having a negative impact on financial markets and investor portfolios.
The Chevron Deference precedent, which is at the center of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, gives even more power to these governmental agencies. When ambiguity exists, this precedent allows courts to simply defer to agencies’ interpretations, even if those interpretations favor the agencies’ own interests. It also allows courts to seek out ambiguity in order to give near-unbridled power to these agencies.
If the Supreme Court upholds Chevron, it will further entrench the power of unelected bureaucrats and make it increasingly difficult for individuals and businesses to challenge agency overreach. However, if the Court rules against Chevron, it would represent a shift toward increased restraint of the administrative state, leading to a reevaluation of the scope and authority of federal agencies.
Israeli arms exports hit record sales. Funny how having products that actually work stimulates sales. I’m betting Russia is enjoying the opposite right now…
Baseball game announcer: We will not be singing the national anthem. Crowd: The hell we won’t! Patriotism ensues.
Speaking of DA’s behaving badly, a followup: Assistant Travis County DA Joseph Frederick, who was charged with aggravated assault, has resigned before he could be fired, his lawyer saying this was to maintain his health benefits, because he has Parkinson’s. Which is strange, because COBRA covers involuntary termination as well.
Argentine President Javier Milei has a glorious rant about how you can’t negotiate with leftists.
This week’s California restaurant chain closing due to the minimum wage hike: Arby’s. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“CDK Global, a major software provider to auto dealerships in the U.S., has been hacked, forcing the company to shut down most of its systems temporarily. This cyberattack effectively halted sales operations at approximately 15,000 car dealerships, including those under General Motors, Group 1 Automotive, and Holman.” Without this software, there’s essential dead in the water. (More details.)
Speaking of money-losing MSM outlets, the incoming editor of the Washington Post says thanks but no thanks after the staff there preemptively published a hit piece on him. How’s that letting the inmates run the asylum working out for you, Jeff Bezos?
George R. Nethercutt Jr., the Republican who ousted Democratic Speaker Thomas S. Foley in the Newt Gingrich Contract with America wave of 1994, dead at 79 (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Is olive oil good for your brain? I hope so, since it’s an Atkins-compliant dressing for my salad, so I generally get more than the recommended teaspoon a day.
More corruption from the Biden family (plus a Texas Democratic congressman), more bad news from the Biden Recession, more pedophile sex offenders, more college madness, and virtue signaling, Third Reich style. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
And remember: If you’re in a large Texas county, there’s a tax appraisal district election tomorrow, so be sure to get out and vote if you haven’t already voted early.
Another week, another corrupt Biden family scheme exposed. “Joe Biden’s Brother Embroiled In High-Ranking Qatari Scheme To ‘Provide Wealth Of Introductions’ Through ‘My Family.'”
Qatar has had a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. While we knew about the EU’s ‘Qatargate,’ investments with the Kushner family, and of course Sen. Bob Menendez advancing Qatar’s interests, Politico reports that the Biden family’s ties to Qatar “would constitute some of the closest known financial links between a relative of President Joe Biden and a foreign government,” if courtroom testimony about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts is substantiated.
In June 2017, Qatar’s neighbors – led by Saudi Arabia, banded together and cut diplomatic ties with the country, citing its alleged support for terrorism. As a result, the country was thrown into a sustained crisis.
To dig themselves out, Qatari rulers began showering well-connected Westerners with gifts and financial benefits, according to Politico, “sometimes in the form of investment funding.”
Around this time, Jim Biden was trying to raise $30 million for embattled hospital chain Americore – teaming up with Florida businessman Amer Rustom, CEO of the Platinum Group, who boasted of his ties to officials in the Middle East, as well as fund manager Michael Lewitt. Together, the three sought investment funding from various Middle Eastern sources for Americore and other ventures – “which came to focus largely on Qatar,” according to a former Americore executive who spoke on condition of anonymity.
According to public records obtained by the outlet, Jim Biden leveraged ties to his older brother and “sought workarounds to restrictions on international money movements,” including one discussion about trying to move money across a Middle Eastern border in the form of gold bars that may or may not have happened.
Let ye who has never smuggled gold across the border of an Arab country cast the first stone.
“My family could provide a wealth of introductions and business opportunities at the highest levels that I believe would be worthy of the interest of His Excellency,” Jim Biden and Rustom wrote in a draft letter to an official at the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority. “On behalf of the Biden family, I welcome your interest here,” the draft continues.
Corrupt to the core.
More evidence from the Biden recession: “Job Openings Tumble, Quits Plunge, Hires Unexpectedly Crater To January 2018 Levels.”
After several months of relatively boring JOLTS prints, this morning Janet Yellen’s favorite labor market indicator once again got exciting, and not in a good way.
Starting at the top, according to the March JOLTS reported, job openings unexpectedly tumbled by 325K – the biggest drop since October 2023 – from an upward revised 8.813 million in February to just 8.488 million, far below the 8.690 million expected – and the lowest number since February 2021 when it last printed below 8 million.
The Department of Justice has arrested two Chinese nationals who allegedly plotted to export U.S. technology to advance the People’s Republic of China’s military operations.
Han Li, 44, and Lin Chen, 64, have been charged with several counts of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), in addition to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), for attempting to export a machine used to process silicon microchips….
“Specifically, the defendants sought to illegally obtain for CGTC a DTX-150 Automatic Diamond Scriber Breaker machine from Dynatex International, a Santa Rosa, California company.”
That’s a backend semiconductor machine for slicing finished individual computer chips off a processed wafer.
Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife were indicted by a federal grand jury on bribery, foreign influence, and money-laundering charges, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Friday afternoon.
The Texas Democrat and his wife are accused of accepting roughly $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities starting in December 2014 and continuing through 2021. The foreign entities are a Mexican bank and an oil and gas company linked to the government of Azerbaijan, according to the Justice Department.
In exchange for the bribes, Cuellar agreed to use his office for promoting favorable U.S. foreign policy towards Azarbaijan and pushing legislative and executive branch officials to adopt policy measures beneficial to the bank, authorities said.
In 2022, Cuellar’s home and office were searched during a federal investigation into Azerbaijan and American businessmen linked to the Middle Eastern nation. Cuellar formerly co-chaired the congressional Azerbaijan caucus.
Cuellar represents TX28. Republicans Jay Furman and Lazaro Garza Jr. are competing in the runoff to challenge Cuellar this fall.
Columbia shows some semblance of a spine, threatens to expel students occupying administrative buildings.
Related: “Columbia Student Who Said ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’ Reportedly ‘Thrown Out Of School.'”
Also: “Police Begin Detaining UCLA Protesters Occupying Campus.”
“Tucked away in the $95 billion military aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan is a $3.5 billion slush fund to open new processing centers for Muslim migrants, in what Sen. Eric Schmitt described as a bid to “supercharge mass migration from the Middle East.” Republicans in congress asleep at the switch again.
It’s not just China that the CCP’s crazy policies are ruining. There are over 500 abandoned, unfinished buildings in Cambodia. A crackdown on online gambling also hastened the demise of many real estate ventures there.
Tranny sex offender tries to snatch a child from an elementary playground in broad daylight. “Trans-identifying male Solomon Galligan [simply] walked on campus last Friday afternoon during recess at Black Forest Hills Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado, and straight-up tried to steal a kid.”
The suspect, who is identified as male in the arrest affidavit, shared news of his transition on Facebook back in 2011.
‘So im starting my hormone shots and i relly cant wait im on my hormone pills ive been on them for almost 4 months i wake up all depressed and crying but in the end its gonna be totally worth it you know what io mean im really excited my measurements are already changing and im super thrilled,’ he wrote.
Galligan was put on the sex offender registry and was convicted that same year of non-consent sexual contact, according to his latest arrest affidavit.
Ernest Herrera, 56, was arrested Monday after he admitted to sexual contact with a 13-year-old student, claiming they had “developed a relationship.”
Herrera taught social studies at Southside Independent School District’s Losoya Middle School in San Antonio.
He was charged with improper relationship between educator and student, a second-degree felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison.
Herrera was booked into Bexar County Jail and held on a $75,000 bond.
The district superintendent stated that Herrera was fired “effective immediately.”
Andrew McCown, 27, was arrested Wednesday and charged with having an “improper relationship” with a 17-year-old female student.
McCown is a math teacher and football coach at Roosevelt High School in San Antonio’s North East ISD.
He was reportedly placed on leave in March and will be terminated.
McCown, who is related to former NFL quarterbacks Josh and Luke McCown, was arrested in 2022 for drunk driving while he was a teacher and coach at Robinson ISD.
According to a statement to MySA, the district “conducted a background check on April 25, 2023, and at that time, it was clear and McCown was hired.”
Another football coach, Perryton ISD athletic director Cole Underwood, was arrested Wednesday and charged with sexual assault of a child, a second-degree felony.
The alleged victim is a Perryton High School student, reportedly a 14-year-old girl.
Underwood was released from Ochiltree County Jail on Thursday after posting a $125,000 bond.
According to a statement from Perryton ISD, Underwood resigned.
Chinese officials are asking villagers to take out fake business licenses. Is that for their own business scams, or to artificially pump up Chinese economic statistics?
Profiles in Cowardice: “PEN America, a leading nonprofit dedicated to free expression, canceled its 2024 World Voices Festival late last week under pressure from pro-Palestinian activists. Many writers affiliated with the organization either threatened to boycott the event unless PEN acceded to certain demands, including labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘genocide,’ or distanced themselves from the free-speech group in response to online pressure from pro-Palestinian activists.”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden not just dropping, but deflating and throwing away the ball on border security, Andrew Cuomo finally behaves badly enough for the MSM to notice, and some tidbits about hacking attacks.
Biden’s proposed budget wants to cutting funding for border security…by 96%:
His administration has presented Congress with a Department of Homeland Security budget proposal that calls for slashing spending on what it calls “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” by 96%.
In fiscal year 2021, Congress approved $1,513,000,000 in funding for border security assets and infrastructure. Biden is now asking that Congress approve just $54,315,000 for fiscal year 2022. That is a reduction of $1,458,685,000—or 96.4%.
What exactly is Biden cutting?
Biden’s DHS has presented Congress with a 562-page “overview” of its fiscal year 2022 budget proposal for Customs and Border Protection. The explanation for its “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” plan is presented on pages 326 through 350 of this document.
The presentation divides “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” into six categories: Integrated Fixed Towers; Remote Video Surveillance Systems; Mobile Video Surveillance System; MVSS-M2S2 Modular Mobile Surveillance System; Border Security Assets and Infrastructure End Items; and Border Wall System Program.
In the past two fiscal years—as reported in Biden’s proposal—the Border Wall System Program has been the most significant of these. “This investment,” it says, “includes real estate and environmental planning, land acquisition, wall system design, construction, and construction and oversight of a physical barrier system.”
In fiscal year 2020, it received $1,375,000,000. In fiscal year 2021, it received the same amount.
Now, if Biden gets his way, the federal government will not spend one penny in fiscal year 2022 on planning or constructing a “physical barrier system” at the border.
Obviously, Democrats want a massive influx of illegal aliens so they can amnesty them and have them vote for Democrats. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
As illegal aliens are still being allowed to cross Texas’ open border, U.S. Border Patrol has reportedly reassigned all hands from “apprehending” to “processing.” A former federal agent says these massive waves of illegal aliens are one of the “biggest sources” of rising cases of the Chinese coronavirus and advises Texans to contact all their state officials to stop illegal crossings at the border.
Victor Avila, a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, has previously told Texas Scorecard that federal and state officials aren’t making serious efforts to stop illegal aliens from crossing the border. He said the number of illegal border crossings has recently skyrocketed.
On Tuesday, Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith (R) told Texas Scorecard that U.S. Border Patrol informed him they had been given new orders. “They’ve all been reassigned to processing,” Smith said. “None of them are actually going to be enforcing the border.” Avila commented, “That is what I’m hearing exactly.”
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe described processing as “paperwork, documentation, etc.”
“We’re in a bad spot now,” Smith said. “Texas is on its own.”
Speaking of border security: “Texas landowner fears for kids’ safety amid worsening border crisis, says they can’t play outside anymore.”
“More Illegal Immigrants, Border Agents Testing Positive for COVID-19.” The way Democrats love expanding governemnt in the name of fighting Flu Manchu, you wonder if this is a bug or a feature… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans released their report on COVID-19’s origins, pointing to evidence of a lab leak, genetic modification, and a cover-up, making the case the virus accidentally emerged from the Wuhan lab in August or September 2019.” Or pretty much what every conservative blogger has been saying for almost a year and a half…
This week’s Democratic political scandal de jour is an official state probe of New York Governor Andrew “Granny Killer” Cuomo committed multiple instances of sexual harassment. “These interviews and pieces of evidence revealed a deeply disturbing yet clear picture: Gov. Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of federal and state laws,” said State Attorney General Letitia James. It would be ironic if it was this rather than killing some 15,000 elderly New Yorkers by putting Flu Manchu cases in nursing homes that brought Cuomo down.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, once widely celebrated for leading New York out of the coronavirus pandemic’s darkest days, is now embroiled in crisis over how many of the state’s nursing home residents died because of the virus and an apparent effort to hide the true toll.
Beginning last spring, Mr. Cuomo was criticized over a state requirement that forced nursing homes to take back residents who had been hospitalized with Covid-19 once they recovered. Critics said the policy had increased the number of virus-related deaths among nursing home residents.
At the time, Mr. Cuomo and his aides dismissed the outcry as politically motivated, and in July, the State Health Department released a report that found the policy was not responsible for an increase. The report did, however, raise questions in some quarters about how the state was reporting deaths.
In January, New York’s attorney general said the administration had undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand. Mr. Cuomo later acknowledged as much, blaming the lower figure on fears that the Trump administration would use the data as a political weapon.
“Don’t you see? We had to lie to you, because Orange Man Bad!”
The suggestion that the actual death count had been covered up intensified criticism of Mr. Cuomo, including from his allies in state government. The scandal deepened after reports that the governor’s aides had altered the July report to hide the true figure.
In April, The New York Times reported that Mr. Cuomo’s aides had gone to far greater lengths than previously known to obscure the death toll, repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months.
First, there was the nursing-home scandal, in which Governor Cuomo deliberately undercounted the number of seniors who died due to his directive placing COVID-positive residents back into understaffed, underequipped nursing homes — and then misled New Yorkers and federal officials about it. Estimates suggest that as many as 15,000 New York seniors due to his actions. Worse yet, while covering up these deaths, he took a cool $5.1 million to write a book touting his COVID leadership and then allegedly used state staff and resources to produce this propaganda piece. One needn’t be a skeptic to link the timing of the deal to the cover-up of the scandal.
And that’s just one of the many fires engulfing the Cuomo administration. At this point, it’s hard to keep up with the litany of abuses perpetrated by Governor Cuomo and his staff. Despite anointing himself as a champion of women, Cuomo has been hit with more than ten accusations of sexual harassment since December. First, he said he’d investigate these allegations himself. When public pressure forced him to establish independent investigations of the charges, he stalled for time and declined to comment while the investigations played out. Now, with a Democratic state attorney general investigating the claims, the governor and his top aides have stonewalled, threatened, and gaslit witnesses and state officials, accusing them of playing political games.
There have also been reports that Cuomo’s friends, family, and donors received preferential access to COVID-19 tests and health information. There’s the matter of a $62 million COVID-related state contract being given to a medical network that donated $230,000 to the Cuomo campaign. There’s the claim by gaming interests that the governor’s team threatened them until they coughed up campaign money. And another investigation is centered around allegations that a top Cuomo aide linked vaccine access to political support of the governor.
In an attempt to silence these stories, the governor has responded with brute force. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is on the record as saying Governor Cuomo hurls invective at officials and the media to make them feel “belittled.” Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim — who lost a close family member to COVID in a New York nursing home — called for Cuomo to provide answers about the nursing-home tragedy. Cuomo personally phoned Kim and threatened to “destroy” him, before holding a press conference in which Kim was referred to as a “habitual liar.” Democratic state senator Alessandra Biaggi has released text messages showing threats she’s received from the Cuomo administration.
The behavior displayed by Governor Cuomo is appalling, but it’s nothing new. This is who he is, and who he has always been.
More ethical lapses snipped.
The obvious lies, the ham-fisted cover-ups, the corruption — we’ve seen it all time and time again from this governor. When there’s even a hint of an investigation into wrongdoing that implicates him or his cabal, Cuomo cuts his losses and scorches the earth. This is who he is: a mean-spirited bully with a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, ruthless in defense of his own venal interests and public image.
The Cuomo administration has run the gamut of travesties and tragedies. Personal viciousness is the governor’s calling card, and criminal behavior his M.O. Even as they’re barraged with one scandal and outrageous revelation after another, he and his inner circle continue to operate as though it’s all business as usual. So why is Cuomo still the governor of New York? Democratic lawmakers — the very same ones who called on him to resign when the sexual-harassment claims first emerged — continue to stand with him and normalize his behavior more than seven months later, partially out of fear and partially out of a complete lack of interest in governing.
Meanwhile, Cuomo seems locked into the Ralph Northam strategy: Assume that the (D) after his name absolves him of all sins against Social Justice and just wait out the storm confident no one will dare hold him accountable for his actions. And don’t forget the media’s nonstop fluffing of Cuomo back in 2020:
The Rolling Stone cover; Politico declaring him a “social media superstar”; Harry Enten of CNN declaring that, “The rise of Cuomo shows that times of tragedy can make very unlikely political heroes”; Carl Bernstein declaring that, “[It’s] real leadership of the kind the president of the United States should have provided to the American people throughout this crisis, but hasn’t”; Jesse McKinley and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo’s handling of the crisis has fostered a nationwide following; Mr. Biden called Mr. Cuomo’s briefings a ‘lesson in leadership,’ and others have described them as communal therapy sessions”; Ben Smith of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo has emerged as the executive best suited for the coronavirus crisis”; the New York Post (!) declaring that New York women were developing crushes on him; and Jen Rubin gushing: “Watching Andrew Cuomo is inspiring, uplifting, fascinating. He weaves details and humor and math and common sense all together. He is magnificent.” Even the Columbia Journalism Review started to worry that the adoring tone of the coverage was overlooking real problems with Cuomo’s decision-making.
And this is all separate from his appearances on his brother’s CNN program. I suspect you remember or can find examples I didn’t list above. Oh, another classic example, from Rebecca Fishbein of Jezebel: “I swooned when he told a reporter he had his own workout routine. I have watched a clip of him and brother Chris Cuomo bickering about their mother at least 20 times. I think I have a crush?”
Democrats in Washington want Andrew Cuomo to resign to allow the Democrat lieutenant governor to run New York state. If a Republican were next in line for the job, Democrats would be falling on grenades for Cuomo. That is, after all, what happened in Virginia when Governor Black Face unleashed his oppo research on the Democrats in the line of succession.
There are no criminal charges against Cuomo.
Cuomo’s problem is not sexual harassment. His problem is Democrats see him as a threat if he chooses to run for president.
Democrats in Washington want no part of playing second fiddle to an outsider. They had their fill of outsiders as presidents with Bill Clinton. Democrat senators want the White House all to themselves. In the 6 presidential elections since Clinton, Democrats have nominated a senator or former senator for president and vice president each time.
National Review wants you to know that Huey Long was a bad role model. Or you could just, you know, watch All the King’s Men, which remains a timeless classic. It won the Oscar in back-to-back years with All About Eve, another timeless classic, both of which showed you what the old studio system could achieve when they were working at the top of their game.
Inside the fight against a ransomware attack against the Texas town of Borger (which is way the hell up north of Amarillo):
In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.
Gibberish ransom demands spat out of printers and displayed on some computer screens. Government files were encrypted, with titles like “Budget Document” replaced by nonsensical combinations of letters and symbols, said current city manager Garrett Spradling.
Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.
One update shared with city officials soon after the attack described how every server was infected, as were about 60% of the 85 computers inspected by that point. A city government email told council members that agendas for a meeting would be in paper format, “since your tablets won’t be able to connect.” An official told a judge it was unclear if computer systems would be operational in time for trials two days away.
Because the city had paid for offsite remote backup, Borger had the capability to reformat servers, reinstall the operating system and bring data back over. A newly purchased server that had yet to be installed came in handy. The police department, however, retained its data locally and the attack hampered officers’ access to previous incident reports, Spradling said.
Expensive Ivy League college film degrees are a scam. “Recent graduates from the Columbia University film program have an average loan debt of six figures against a low-to-mid five-figure income. And given that the master’s program takes four years, Columbia alumni enter the competitive field at around age 30, a detrimentally late start. Graduates soon face the shocking realization that they not only crippled their future but also wasted their money and youth.”
Automotive News published a report on Thursday of this week noting that EVs were 2.3 times more expensive to service than ICE vehicles after three months of ownership. Analytics firm We Predict compiled the data by looking at roughly 19 million vehicles between the 2016 and 2021 model years.
That figure drops to just 1.6 times more expensive after one year, the report noted, as a result of a 77% drop in maintenance costs and a decline in repair costs. The data showed that service techs spend about twice as much time diagnosing problems with EVs as they do with regular gas vehicles. They spend about 1.5 times longer fixing them and the labor rate for repairs was about 1.3 times higher.
Presumably some of this gap will drop as technicians become more familiar with them.
Classical music is under racial attack. Orchestras and opera companies are said to discriminate against black musicians and composers. The canonical repertoire—the product of a centuries-long tradition of musical expression—is allegedly a function of white supremacy.
Not one leader in the field has defended Western art music against these charges. Their silence is emblematic. Other supposed guardians of Western civilization, whether museum directors, humanities professors, or scientists, have gone AWOL in the face of similar claims, lest they themselves be denounced as racist.
Also this: “Orchestras should hire diversity consultants to develop ‘extra-musical evaluation’ criteria for orchestral positions, such as serving as an institutional spokesman.” Diversity consultants always demand hiring more diversity consultants. What are the odds?
The Offspring fire longtime drummer Pete Parada for refusing to get a Flu Manchu vaccine. “Given my personal medical history and the side-effect profile of these jabs, my doctor has advised me not to get a shot at this time.” If the other members are vaccinated, why the hell should they care? Stupider still: Parada already caught the virus last year, so he probably has more immunity than the vaccine provides…
Col. Dave Severance, who helped take Iwo Jima (and commanded the second flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, the one in the famous photograph), dead at 102.
Where does this rank among disturbing YouTube videos? I give it a three.
A major leak containing a register with the details of nearly two million CCP members has occurred – exposing members who are now working all over the world, while also lifting the lid on how the party operates under Xi Jinping, says Sharri Markson.
Ms Markson said the leak is a register with the details of Communist Party members, including their names, party position, birthday, national ID number and ethnicity.
“It is believed to be the first leak of its kind in the world,” the Sky News host said.
“What’s amazing about this database is not just that it exposes people who are members of the communist party, and who are now living and working all over the world, from Australia to the US to the UK,” Ms Markson said.
“But it’s amazing because it lifts the lid on how the party operates under President and Chairman Xi Jinping”.
Ms Markson said the leak demonstrates party branches are embedded in some of the world’s biggest companies and even inside government agencies.
“Communist party branches have been set up inside western companies, allowing the infiltration of those companies by CCP members – who, if called on, are answerable directly to the communist party, to the Chairman, the president himself,” she said.
“Along with the personal identifying details of 1.95 million communist party members, mostly from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 communist party branches, many of them inside companies”.
I’ve poked around a bit to find a copy of that database, but all I could locate was an excerpt featuring the first 5,000 names or so. If anyone knows where I can find the full list, let me know in the comments.
Here’s a story so strange I wanted to turn it into a separate post, but details remain too murky: Fabless chip designer Arm Holdings fired the head of its Chinese business unit, but he’s refusing to leave:
Arm Ltd., the chip designer owned by SoftBank Group Corp., accused the ousted head of its China joint venture of hurting its business there, escalating a dispute that’s becoming a test of Beijing’s willingness to protect foreign investment in the world’s second-largest economy.
The U.K. chip giant in June announced it was firing Allen Wu, the head of its Chinese unit, over undisclosed breaches of conduct, but the executive has refused to step down and remains in control of the strategically important operation. Rather than the peaceful, rapid resolution that both sides have said they want, the situation has deteriorated.
Wu has hired his own security and won’t let representatives of Arm Ltd. or his board on the premises, said a person familiar with the situation. He’s refused to hold a planned event to connect Chinese chipmakers with Arm Ltd. and avoided negotiations despite public statements to the contrary, said the person, who asked not to be named.
Wu is “propagating false information and creating a culture of fear and confusion among Arm China employees,” the U.K.-based company said in a statement. “Allen’s focus on his own self-preservation has also put China semiconductor innovation at risk as he has attempted to block the critical communication and support our China partners require from Arm for ongoing and future chip designs.”
Arm China disputed the claims in an emailed response to queries, adding that Wu was open to talks and there have been no disruptions in business engagement between Arm Ltd. and its China clients.China is the largest market for semiconductors and the U.K. firm relies on Arm China to conduct business with local customers, including Huawei Technologies Co. The country accounts for a large proportion of the company’s global revenue and resolving the conflict will be crucial to SoftBank’s reported plans to sell Arm, a lynchpin in the global smartphone and computing industry that the Japanese firm bought for $32 billion in 2016.
In early June, Arm China’s board – which includes representatives from Arm Ltd. and Chinese investors – ousted Wu for setting up an investing firm that competes with its own businesses there. He refused to accept the decision, saying it was invalid and has remained in control at Arm China’s headquarters in Shenzhen.
The intricacies of Chinese rules confer an advantage to Wu as the holder of key registration documents. As the legal representative of Arm China, Wu holds the company’s registration documents and the company seal, or stamp. Changing the legal representative requires taking possession of the company stamp — something Wu has refused to give up.
It was once an accepted truth that China’s increased economic trade and participation in international bodies such as the World Trade Organization would benefit everyone.
China and its citizens would benefit through the jobs and wealth earned from their vast export market. Americans and Europeans would benefit from access to an ever-greater array of ever-cheaper goods. Asian, African, and other American nations would benefit from access to both sides of this market and the incentive to replicate a version of China’s export model. And the world’s democracies, the cornerstones of the post-Cold War international order, would benefit from China’s recognition that it would gain more by abiding the rules of the game than by breaking them.
To borrow from Shakespeare, “the jest of the truth savors but of shallow wit, now that thousands weep more than did celebrate it.”
The weeping is real. Each week brings us increasingly horrific stories of the suffering endured by China’s already impoverished Uighur population. More than 2 million of these innocent citizens have been forced into concentration camps over the past decade. They have been indoctrinated to believe that there is no ideology of value save that of the Communist Party and its god-emperor Xi Jinping. Some have been forcibly sterilized, others sent far from their homes and families. As reported just this month, hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are forced into annual servitude as cotton pickers.
There’s a defining lesson here. China was supposed to be a top partner to the liberal international order. Instead, it is now taking inspiration from the Antebellum South’s slave economy, using forced labor in support of an unaccountable elite. Even were it not beholden to China, Hollywood could not invent a better example than the Uighurs’ plight to expose the lie that China’s economic development would usher in a kinder and gentler policy on its part.
Of course, Hollywood’s pathetic deference to Beijing isn’t a solitary American corporate story. It is the story. Instead of markets leading to more economic and political freedom in China, they have led major U.S. corporations to self-censor in order to gain access to Chinese consumers and their cheap labor. As with the NBA, which rightly cares a great deal about black lives but apparently not one iota about Uighur lives, major corporations such as Disney, Dell, and Walmart deal with China even if they must do so with terrible strings attached.
Beijing is explicit in its expectation that trade opportunities come with the price of silent acquiescence. Where the Chinese Communist Party signs treaties — whether the rules of the WTO, promises on intellectual property regimes, or carbon emissions targets — its pledges must be greeted only with applause from the West, never with any enforcement or demands that Xi be held to his word.
US carriers and telecommunications companies receiving Universal Service funding are now required to remove all Huawei technology, by order of the federal government.
The US Federal Communications Commission has ordered certain carriers to “rip and replace” all equipment produced by Huawei. It follows continuing investigations into claims that Huawei represents a threat to national security, and Huawei’s application for a review of a similar ruling by the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau in June.
“A laundry list of evidence before us compels this result,” said FCC chairman Ajit Pal in a statement. “But to summarize some of the main points, Huawei has a long and well-documented history of close ties to the Chinese military and intelligence communities, as well as the Chinese Communist Party, at every level of the company— all the way up to its founder.”
“Huawei is subject to sweeping Chinese intelligence laws compelling Huawei’s assistance and cooperation with Chinese intelligence services and forbidding the disclosure of that assistance,” he continued. “Moreover, the concerns about Huawei aren’t just hypothetical: Independent entities have identified numerous security vulnerabilities in Huawei equipment and found it to be less secure than that of other companies— perhaps deliberately so.”
Speaking of crackdowns, President Donald Trump’s administration has added more Chinese companies to the blacklist:
The Trump administration is poised to add China’s top chipmaker SMIC and national offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies, Reuters reported citing a document and sources, curbing their access to U.S. investors and escalating tensions with Beijing.
The latest crackdown comes after a report from Reuters earlier this month that the Department of Defense (DOD) was planning to designate four more Chinese companies as owned or controlled by the Chinese military, bringing the number of Chinese companies affected to 35. A recent executive order issued by President Donald Trump would prevent U.S. investors from buying securities of the listed firms starting late next year.
It was not immediately clear when the new tranche, would be published in the Federal Register. But the list comprises China Construction Technology Co Ltd and China International Engineering Consulting Corp, in addition to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) and China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), Reuters reported.
On paper the Chinese army looks pretty impressive, with 78 combat brigades and nearly as many specialized brigades. Over the last decade the Chinese army has been converting its divisions to brigades, many of them independent brigades like the American Brigade combat teams. That conversion is still underway, although by now nearly all the regiments that formerly comprised the major subunits of divisions have been converted to brigades.
The task of turning all those new brigades into well-equipped and trained ones is still underway. There are three types of combat brigades. The most potent is the heavy brigade, each with about a hundred tanks and dozens of tracked IFVs (infantry fighting vehicles) plus detachments of engineers and other specialists. The problem with these heavy brigades is that not all of them have the latest tanks. China has not built enough of its most modern tank to replace all the older models. As more of the latest tank enter service heavy brigades receive them and have to go through months of training to learn how to get the most out of them.
Snip.
The major problem with the army is that all the elite units (special operations and airborne) as well as key units stationed in the capital and a few other places have few conscripts. Nearly all the conscripts are assigned to the combat brigades and the support brigades assigned to each of the 13 Group Armies. Units with conscripts spend about half the year training the new ones and if there is a war these units would, half the time, have a large portion of their troops poorly trained and not fully integrated into the unit. This is a major problem for combat units that depend on well-trained troops who have been with their units long enough for commanders to know what they can get out of them.
As China pushes to become a blue-water power, nuclear-powered submarines are critically important to Beijing’s plan. Historically the Chinese Navy’s (PLAN) nuclear-powered submarine fleet has been constrained by its limited construction capacity. There is only one shipyard in the country up to the task. But that yard has been undergoing a massive enlargement. And now, recent satellite imagery suggests an additional capacity expansion.
China’s nuclear-powered submarine fleet was already expected to get much larger in the coming years. This latest development suggests that China could pump out submarines at an even greater rate.
Just how many nuclear submarines China will build over the next ten years is a hot topic. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) recently forecast China’s submarine fleet to grow by six nuclear-powered attack submarines by 2030. Other observers, such as retired Capt. James Fanell who was Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, place their estimates even higher.
A senior Chinese People’s Liberation Army officer, Lt. Gen. He Lei, penned an article explaining why China’s Korean War experience should guide its modern military strategy toward the United States.
The executive officer of the PLA’s Academy of Military Science, He is a known hard-liner on Taiwan and the U.S. In his present assignment, the general is responsible for training PLA officers and strategy development. His words carry weight both for what they say about evolving PLA doctrine and their influence on Beijing’s Central Military Commission. His arguments are certainly forward-leaning, referencing the PLA’s rising expectation that it will have to fight a near-term war with either the U.S., Taiwan, or both.
Beginning with a creative history of the Korean War, He explains that Mao Zedong’s deployment of the PLA against the U.S. military in North Korea shattered “the myth that U.S. imperialism is invincible.” Here, we see a presentation of the U.S. military as a force that can be both contested and defeated. The centrality of the Korean War to the Chinese military psyche takes on significant importance in the context of three factors. First, the war is seen as a necessary defense of the motherland against a great external threat. Second, the PLA has limited post-Korean War experience of major conflict. Third, China views the outcome of that war as being broadly in its favor. Taken together, He thus uses the Korean War to reinforce the idea that China can take on a more powerful foe and triumph.
China’s military might be shocked to find America’s military a wee bit more advanced and prepared than it was in 1950…
“China forced hundreds of thousands of children in Xinjiang, where the majority of the population belongs to the ethnic Uyghur minority, into ‘boarding schools‘ as they lost their parents to communist concentration camps.”
More than half a million Tibetan farmers and pastoralists have been placed in military training facilities to be turned into wage workers controlled by the authorities. This model replicates the one used in Xinjiang internment camps where more than a million Uyghur Muslims are imprisoned and indoctrinated.
A study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute shows that the Chinese regime runs 380 “concentration camps” in the Xinjiang autonomous region. According to the Chinese Communist Party, Tibetans are a “lazy people” who need to be reprogrammed. To this end, Chinese leaders want to reduce the “negative influence” of the Buddhist religion.
The FBI is warning law-enforcement agencies to beware of cooperating with a Chinese government campaign to coerce U.S. residents to return to China to face criminal charges, according to a counterintelligence bulletin obtained by Yahoo News.
The bulletin comes after eight people, including a former New York Police Department officer, were indicted on charges of acting as illegal agents for Beijing.
“State and local public safety personnel should be aware that Chinese Government officials, such as diplomats and officials with China’s primary law enforcement agency, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), may seek assistance to obtain sensitive US law enforcement or non-public personally identifiable information on individuals of interest,” which is marked for official use only and was distributed to law enforcement agencies around the country.
The warning concerns China’s long-standing policy of reaching beyond its borders to target people it accuses of financial crimes, even if they are permanently living abroad. The repatriations, often coerced by blackmail or threats, are part of Beijing’s anti-corruption campaign called Fox Hunt.
There has been an increasing number of allegations that China has coerced, even kidnapped, its citizens living abroad, and that it targets political dissidents as well as those accused of financial crimes.
When it comes to the impact of COVID-19 on the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the conventional wisdom seems to be that the emergence of the virus was mishandled and the Communist government has yet to be transparent about it, but that the spread was arrested through aggressive public-health practices and the economy has rebounded.
As usual with the PRC, the reality is more complex. In fact, recent signs of tension between President Xi Jinping and other leaders, notably Premier Li Keqiang, indicate the additional impact the pandemic had on an underlying soft economy and the country’s growing isolation because of Beijing’s poor handling of the crisis and other factors.
Snip.
In the past few years, Xi has centralized his personal authority to a degree not seen in a Chinese leader since Chairman Mao. In 2017, Xi took control of the country’s military and often appears in public in a military uniform. He is, in effect, the head of the National Security Council, the head of the foreign policy apparatus, and of multiple economic commissions. In recent public appearances, the state news agency Xinhua has referred to him as “People’s Leader.” Can “Chairman Xi” be far off? In additional to title inflation, in 2018, he imposed constitutional changes on the National People’s Congress that removed a term limit preventing him from seeking a third term in 2023. Xi’s moves and power consolidation mean he is responsible and accountable for both the good and the bad. And lately, there’s been far more bad than good.
Starting with the economy: However the government may have controlled the pandemic, the economy remains weak. Economic growth prior to the pandemic — according to China watchers skeptical of government numbers — was probably flat or negative, notwithstanding official statistics that had it closer to 6 percent. Government at every level and households had combined debt of about 300 percent of GDP. U.S. debt/GDP even after trillions in coronavirus relief spending is less than half China’s level, which leaves fewer levers for Beijing to pull to help stimulate the economy.
While the U.S. Federal Reserve and Congress have injected more than $6 trillion into the economy through massive purchases across many asset classes, the People’s Bank of China balance sheet has remained flat this year. The U.S. Congress provided about $630 billion in direct support to small businesses, compared with less than one-tenth that amount the PRC made available to small businesses in China. Retail sales in China for each month of 2020 are down compared with the same month the year prior. The real data are certainly worse than what the government discloses. In the U.S., retail sales in July were at all-time highs, eclipsing their pre-pandemic levels. According to economist Carlos Casanove at French insurer Coface, the PRC “recovery narrative has been overplayed.”
This is contributing to the tension between Xi and Li. At a press conference in May, the prime minister acknowledged that 600 million people in China — about half the population — subsist on 1000 yuan ($140) a month. This number includes the estimates of 80 million who lost work due to the virus who may have no income and no meaningful social safety net in China. Li’s data track with World Bank data which show a vast disparity in income between the urban elite and the mostly poor rural population. Even so, his comments were out of step with other government-touted figures, including a central bank survey in April of 30,000 urban residents who have an average of nearly half a million dollars in household assets. This figure generated so much controversy that the central bank withdrew it.
Read the whole thing.
“Chinese and European Union officials have agreed to an economic investment deal agreement despite international outrage over the communist regime’s human rights abuses and President-elect Joe Biden’s desire to coordinate an allied posture toward Beijing.” Also, get this: “‘This agreement will uphold our interests & promotes our core values,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen insisted Wednesday. ‘It provides us a lever to eradicate forced labour.'” Translation: “We know China engages in slave labor and we’re going to do business with it anyway, and just pretend we care about eliminating it.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The Guardian newspaper in London had an exclusive story in which Victor Zhang, the vice president of Huawei, stated that in light of Trump’s defeat, Britain should review its decision to ban the telecoms giant from its 5G network. Zhang warned that this decision would have economic repercussions for Britain, adding: “As a global company, we want to work with governments to ensure they have the policies to secure growth. The decision was a political one motivated by U.S. perceptions of Huawei, and not those of the U.K. This is not really motivated by security, but about a trade war between the U.S. and China.”
Or consider the fact that this year, some British politicians have shown a certain amount of moral grit by expressing concerns about new authoritarian security laws in Hong Kong and China’s persecution of its Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. How have the Chinese reacted? This week, Fang Wenjian, chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in the U.K. and the Bank of China’s boss, issued another menacing warning. The Sunday Times and City A.M. have both published stories linking him to the threat that any decline in U.K.-China relations could force some Chinese firms out of the U.K. In other words: “Don’t criticize China’s abysmal human rights record, or you risk losing our business.”
Alarms bells are also ringing because of Citiking International, a Chinese-backed private equity firm with offices around the world and, it has been reported, possible ties to the Chinese Communist Party. It is trying to buy Eclipse Aerospace, a small firm based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that employs 65 people. According to Defense News, Eclipse Aerospace produces “very light jets” that are used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Defense News states that its planes feature “sophisticated avionics, engines (originally designed for cruise missiles) and a full authority digital engine control system that all contain sensitive national security design information.” Everybody should be deeply worried about the Chinese having access to this sensitive technology, for obvious reasons.
Snip.
The fact is, China has ruined the world in 2020 by its reckless handling of COVID-19. For this, it ought to pay very heavy reparations. It will not. Instead, the reverse is happening. China’s economy is powering ahead, and its leaders are bullying weaker Western nations. With Trump all but gone from the White House, and faltering Joe Biden preparing to move in, it now looks as though China’s quest for world domination is back on track. What a calamity.
“Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China.” “New documents show Lens Technology, which makes iPhone glass and is owned by China’s richest woman, received Uighur Muslim laborers transferred from Xinjiang.”
One of the oldest and most well-known iPhone suppliers has been accused of using forced Muslim labor in its factories, according to documents uncovered by a human rights group, adding new scrutiny to Apple’s human rights record in China.
The documents, discovered by the Tech Transparency Project and shared exclusively with The Washington Post, detail how thousands of Uighur workers from the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang were sent to work for Lens Technology. Lens also supplies Amazon and Tesla, according to its annual report.
Lens Technology is one of at least five companies connected to Apple’s supply chain that have now been linked to alleged forced labor from the Xinjiang region, according to human rights groups. Lens Technology stands out from other Apple component suppliers because of its high-profile founder and long, well-documented history going back to the early days of the iPhone.
Meng Yu, former chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), received more than $1.7 million in total pay and benefits in 2019, according to the latest financial disclosures obtained by Transparent California, a taxpayer watchdog group. Under Meng’s leadership the pension fund, which covers two million members in the retirement system and 1.5 million members under its health program, has been subject to federal inquiries into its investments in Chinese government entities.
Meng took the lead at the pension fund after China’s Thousand Talents Program recruited him to serve as the deputy CIO of China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), a state-controlled entity. The FBI considers the Thousand Talents Program an example of “China’s non-traditional espionage against the United States” that seeks to recruit people to transfer U.S. trade secrets and taxpayer-funded research into the hands of the Chinese government. Meng told the propaganda outlet People’s Daily that he worked for SAFE out of patriotic commitment to “the motherland.”
When a hacking organization’s secret tools are stolen and dumped online for anyone to pick up and repurpose, the consequences can roil the globe. Now one new discovery shows how long those effects can persist. Five years after the notorious spy contractor Hacking Team had its code leaked online, a customized version of one of its stealthiest spyware samples has shown up in the hands of possibly Chinese-speaking hackers.
At an online version of the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit this week, researchers Mark Lechtik and Igor Kuznetsov plan to present their findings about that mysterious malware sample, which they detected on the PCs of two of Kaspersky’s customers earlier this year.1 The malware is particularly unusual—and disturbing—because it’s designed to alter a target computer’s Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the firmware that is used to load the computer’s operating system. Because the UEFI sits on a chip on the computer’s motherboard outside of its hard drive, infections can persist even if a computer’s entire hard drive is wiped or its operating system is reinstalled, making it far harder to detect or disinfect than normal malware.
The malware the Kaspersky researchers discovered uses its UEFI foothold to plant a second, more traditional piece of spyware on the computer’s hard drive, a unique piece of code Kaspersky has called MosaicRegressor. But even if that second-stage payload is discovered and wiped, the UEFI remains infected and can simply deploy it again. “Even if you would take the physical disk out and replace it with a new one, the malware will keep reappearing,” says Lechtik, who along with Kuznetsov works as a researcher on Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team. “So I think to date, it’s the most persistent method of having malware on your device, which is why it is so dangerous.”
On 4 May 2016, a sudden mass death of fish in the Lichu River in Minyak Lhagang, Dartsedo County in Karze Prefecture brought hundreds of local Tibetans out on the street, protesting against a lithium mining company (Ronda Lithium Co Ltd) that released mine waste into the Lichu River, a tributary of Nakchu/Yalong river, the biggest river that merges with Yangtse downstream.
Yet another case of contaminated mine waste released into Tibetan rivers by a Chinese mining company clearly contradicts Beijing’s call for Green Development in their 13th Five Year plan. In recent years, there have been an increase in the number of cases of environmental degradation caused by Chinese mining companies in Tibet, resulting in more than 20 large scale mining-related protests since 2009.
China is also repressing Chinese Jews. I was unaware that Kaifeng, Henan, is home to a Jewish community dating back to the 9th century.
Speaking of which: “As the World Health Organization and other China puppets struggle to assemble a ‘natural origin’ theory for COVID-19, the CCP has been going to great lengths to quash non-sanctioned investigations that may instead point to a lab escape from research facilities which made international headlines in 2015 for dangerous ‘gain-of-function’ research – by which they were manipulating coronaviruses to better infect humans.”
More than a year since the first known person was infected with the coronavirus, an AP investigation shows the Chinese government is strictly controlling all research into its origins, clamping down on some while actively promoting fringe theories that it could have come from outside China.
The government is handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to scientists researching the virus’ origins in southern China and affiliated with the military, the AP has found. But it is monitoring their findings and mandating that the publication of any data or research must be approved by a new task force managed by China’s cabinet, under direct orders from President Xi Jinping, according to internal documents obtained by the AP. A rare leak from within the government, the dozens of pages of unpublished documents confirm what many have long suspected: The clampdown comes from the top.
As a result, very little has been made public. Authorities are severely limiting information and impeding cooperation with international scientists.
A host of corporate media outlets including CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC have participated in private dinners and sponsored trips with the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a Chinese Communist Party-funded group seeking to garner “favorable coverage” and “disseminate positive messages” regarding China, The National Pulse can reveal.
Other outlets involved in the propaganda operation include Forbes, the Financial Times, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC News, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, AFP, TIME magazine, LA Times, The Hill, BBC, and The Atlantic.
The relationship is revealed in the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings, which reveal a relationship spanning over a decade between establishment media outlets and the China–United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).
The president of Columbia University is asking Joe Biden to end the monitoring of foreign-born students, especially those who are ethnically Chinese.
He characterized such monitoring as “paranoia.”
Columbia President Lee Bollinger issued the letter on December 3 as part of a broader statement asking Biden to “End the Trump Administration’s Assault on the International Exchange of Ideas.” In 2019, Bollinger wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, warning that he would not “start spying” on foreign students.
Won’t someone please think of the plight Ivy league university presidents desperate to keep sucking China’s teat?
“How The Chinese Use Illegal Online Gambling And Tether To Launder Over $1 Trillion Yuan.” ‘Chinese citizens launder as much as $153 billion per year with the help of online gambling and such cryptocurrency as tether, which has long been rumored to be a key driver of upside into bitcoin.”
Huawei very much is the spearhead, because in the Chinese model of economic expansion and the development of world economic power, broadband is the opener to everything else.
It’s a company with a lot of very talented people. Ten years ago – if you asked people, “What Chinese products do you buy?” – you wouldn’t mention a single brand name. But everyone now knows Huawei. They produce the world’s best smartphones. They certainly dominate 5G internet. But Huawei is not a Chinese company. It is an imperial company.
The Chinese empire is doing better than us because it’s absorbed the talent of a very large number of others. Fifty percent of their engineers are foreign. They bankrupted their competition and hired their talent. They have 50,000 foreign employees, and a very disproportionate amount of their research and development (R&D) is conducted by foreign employees.
I’ve seen this personally. I worked for several years as an investment banker in Hong Kong for a Chinese-owned boutique. During that time, I collaborated with people from Huawei. I introduced them to foreign governments. Huawei was very clear about its objectives. They’d tell, for example, the government of Mexico, “Let us build a national broadband network. Once you get broadband, you get e-commerce and e-finance, and then we’ll supply the logistics and the financing for that, and we’ll integrate you into the world market.”
They’ve become one of the most connected societies on earth. China has, by far, the highest percentage of e-commerce of any society in the world. Electronic payment systems and electronic banking are much more advanced there than anywhere else.
Snip.
China has a set of weak spots. First, they’ve got a very rapidly aging population. Like all countries with aging populations, they need to export capital and employ young people and other countries to pay for the pensions of their own people. Germany does this, too. That’s part of the motivation for China’s strategy. They will have an enormous burden supporting the aged in the future. They’re hoping to deal with that through automation, through more efficient health care.
Their biggest problem is the ambitions of their young people. The Chinese created a generation of which 10 million people each year take the gaokao (university) exam. A third of them study engineering. They expect opportunities.
If China loses its edge in technology, if they fall behind the West, if the Communist Party is seen to have failed in competing with the West, I think that will be a significant threat to its power.
Worth reading, even if you take it with several grains of salt.
If I missed any China news, feel free to share in the comments.
