I know that any time I talk about semiconductors, a significant percentage of my readership’s eyes glaze over, but this is Big Freaking News.
Intel shares rose 6% in premarket trading after Reuters reported that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, or TSMC, had approached US chip designers Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and Broadcom about taking stakes in a joint venture that would operate the struggling chipmaker’s factories.
Four sources told Reuters that the Taiwanese chipmaking giant would run Intel’s foundry division under the new proposal, producing chips tailored to customer requirements but not owning more than 50%. The sources added that Qualcomm has also been approached about the venture.
TSMC is far and away the largest chip foundry (a company that builds chips for other companies, but doesn’t design its own chips) in the world, and the one with a clear technological lead over everyone else. TSMC has the third largest market cap of any semiconductor company.
Broadcom is the second-largest semiconductor company in the world by market cap, and they have their fingers in a lot of different pies: networking, wireless, storage, you name it. They’re generally considered a fabless chip designer, but the company is such a weird amalgamation of other companies (what we call Broadcom used to be Avago until they acquired Broadcom in 2016) that they might still have a lower end fab or two lurking somewhere in the company. They also use TSMC as a foundry, though I’m not sure how extensively. They’ve also recently made a big move into software, acquiring CA Associates and VMWare, among others.
Nvidia is a fabless chip designer (the sort of company that contracts with foundries to fab their chips) that went heavily into high end GPUs (the chips that render video for your PC, in Nvidia’s case geared toward high end games and other highly demanding tasks), then crypto-mining chips, and more recently into chips geared for AI applications, all very lucrative market segments, which has made Nvidia not only first among semiconductor market cap, but among the largest companies by market cap in the world (along with Apple and Microsoft). Nvidia has their chips fabricated by TSMC, as well as some by Samsung and GlobalFoundries, which was spun off from…
Advanced Micro Devices, which used to be an Integrated Device Manufacturer (or IDM, a company designs their own chips and builds them in their own fabs) creating Intel-compatible CPUs, but eventually spun off their fabrication plants as GlobalFoundries because they couldn’t keep up with Intel’s capital spending. AMD also has some of their highest end chips fabricated by TSMC. If AMD were to help take over Intel, it would be an extremely ironic ending to a longtime rivalry.
Qualcomm is a lot like Broadcom: A mostly fabless design house with its fingers in lots of different pies, and they’re about the sixth largest semiconductor company by market cap. Broadcom tried to acquire Qualcomm in 2017-18 and was blocked by the Trump45 administration.
Intel is an IDM, and for decades was the undisputed “chipzilla” of the semiconductor world. Intel’s CPUs were the dominant processor for the vast majority of the last 40 years and a huge ingredient for helping create the PC revolution. Intel used to be the technology process leader as well, but somewhere along the way they screwed up their sub-10nm process nodes, allowing TSMC to take the process technology crown. Indeed, they screwed up so badly that they’ve been forced to have TSMC fab some of its highest end chips. Despite having a vast number of fabs, Intel’s market cap has slipped down to 16th among semiconductor companies.
Back to the piece:
The sources noted that the Trump administration is exploring ways to revive Intel and strengthen US manufacturing under the ‘America First’ agenda. They added that TSMC’s joint venture pitch to chip designers took place before the company, alongside President Trump, announced plans last month to invest $100 billion in semiconductor manufacturing in the US, building on its existing $65 billion investment in its Phoenix, Arizona, factories.
Any deal between TSMC and Intel would be subjected to approval from the Trump administration.
If the Trump Administration’s goal is to increase available sub-10nm wafer starts (and it should be) and maintain American control of Intel’s fabs, then this proposal is a win-win. Intel’s fabs plus TSMC’s tech would create a foundry powerhouse. It wouldn’t happen overnight (nothing in semiconductors happens overnight), but probably in 12-24 months, depending on how quickly the new entity can acquire the necessary pieces of equipment to upgrade Intel’s fabs to thee new tech (I’m guessing that the availability of ASML steppers will, as usual, be the gating factor). And all this without the tens of billions in taxpayer subsidies for the CHIPS Act.
If this goes through, it would have mostly winners, with a few losers:
Winners
Every company that’s part of the deal. TSMC gets to radically expand production capacity without spending $20 billion+ to build a new fab. Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and Qualcomm gain a lot more capacity for expanding production of their high end chips. Ditto for Apple (who’s not part of the deal, but who is TSMC’s biggest customer and a big demand driver for cutting edge fab capacity) and every other consumer of sub-10nm chips.
AMD additionally gets the egoboo of partially taking over its longtime hated rival and confirming it’s crown as the x86/x64 chip manufacturer of choice. Plus their then-risky decision to spin off GlobalFoundries looks like a genius move in hindsight.
The Trump Administration, which gets to take credit for vastly increasing American Foundry capacity at zero additional taxpayer expense and keeps Intel under American control.
Semiconductor equipment manufacturers like ASML, Applied Materials, LAM Research, Tokyo Electron and KLA (short term). It’s likely most or all of those companies (along with smaller players like Axcelis and Teradyne) will receive a bump in extra sales from leveling up Intel’s fabs to run TSMC’s process.
American chip startups: With so much high end capacity becoming available, existing and potential chip startups are going to look like more attractive investment capital opportunities.
ARM Holdings: ARM doesn’t make chips, they’re an IP design house that licenses their functional chip blocks to other chip designers. Just about every foundry and IDM is a licensee (yes, including Intel and TSMC), so unleashing more chip designs will almost certainly result in more royalties for ARM. (Nvidia tried to buy ARM in 2020, and regulators quashed that idea good and hard.)
Intel investors, who will either get a big lump-sum payment or shares in the new, probably far more profitable company (depending on how the buyout is structured).
Even Intel wins long-term by unleashing existing fab capacity to take on new business not tied to its faltering CPU manufacturing model. And actually, with TSMC’s process, Intel has a chance to recover in the CPU space as well.
Losers
Samsung: Along with TSMC and Intel, Samsung (which has both IDM and foundry components) has some of the best sub-10nm process tech in the world. They gain a whole lot of unleashed competition and stand on the outside looking in.
Intel‘s dreams of reclaiming their spot at the top of the heap, and suffering the indignity of being partially owned by AMD. How the mighty have fallen.
Every Chinese fab, which goes from “very far behind” to “even further behind.”
Semiconductor equipment manufacturers (long term): They better enjoy the out-of-band upgrade money from retrofitting Intel’s fabs, as it will likely mean a significant delay in anyone building a new cutting edge wafer fab for quite a while. And having two of their biggest customers team up is probably going to put them under a lot of downward pricing pressure.
GlobalFoundries (and other trailing edge foundries) might lose some business, but there’s very little overlap between Intel/TSMC cutting edge processes and GlobalFoundries trailing-edge fabs. Ditto UMC.
Are there anti-trust concerns with such a heavy accumulation of cutting edge process technology? Oh yeah. Big time. But almost all of those concerns were already there in some form or another thanks to the interconnected “cooperation” nature of the industry. All those companies going in with TSMC were already getting chips fabbed by TSMC. Samsung could try to claim that the deal would result in TSMC having a de-facto monopoly on sub-10nm foundry business, but it wouldn’t start with one, and that business isn’t the whole of foundry business (though it is the most profitable part), much less semiconductors as a whole.
Given that this would go a long way toward achieving Trump’s goal of increasing cutting edge fab capacity in America, I would imagine that the Trump47 administration could very well be persuaded to let this deal go through.
Communist China never rests in its quest to infect American computers with spy and malware, as in this story.
The threat of cyberattack is never far away, be that by Amazon ransomware actors with an impossible-to-recover-from threat, or Windows zero-day exploits and even the hacking of the iPhone USB-C port. Luckily, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is also never far away when it comes to warnings about such attacks and hacker threats. But eyebrows will surely be raised just a little as the FBI and Department of Justice have confirmed that thousands of U.S. computers and networks were accessed to remove malware files remotely. Here’s what you need to know.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI have confirmed that a court-authorized operation allowed the remote removal of malware files from 4,258 U.S.-based computers. The operation, targeting the PlugX malware variant as used by what are said to be China-backed threat actors, was, the Jan. 14 statement said, designed to take down a version of PlugX used by the group known as Mustang Panda or Twill Typhoon, capable of controlling infected computers to steal information.
According to court documents, the DoJ said, the People’s Republic of China government “paid the Mustang Panda group to develop this specific version of PlugX,” which has been in use since 2014 and infiltrated thousands of computer systems in campaigns targeting U.S. victims.
“The FBI acted to protect U.S. computers from further compromise by PRC state-sponsored hackers,”Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said, adding that the announcement “reaffirms the FBI’s dedication to protecting the American people by using its full range of legal authorities and technical expertise to counter nation-state cyber threats.”
Thousands of U.S. computers and networks, estimated at 4,258 by the DoJ, were identified by the FBI in the technical operation to detect and delete the malware threat remotely. The first of nine warrants was obtained in August 2024 in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania authorizing the deletion of PlugX from U.S.-based computers, the last expired on Jan. 3. “The FBI tested the commands, confirmed their effectiveness, and determined that they did not otherwise impact the legitimate functions of, or collect content information from, infected computers,” the statement said.
“This wide-ranging hack and long-term infection of thousands of Windows-based computers, including many home computers in the United States, demonstrates the recklessness and aggressiveness of PRC state-sponsored hackers,” said U.S. Attorney Jacqueline Romero for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “The Department of Justice’s court-authorized operation to delete PlugX malware proves its commitment to a ‘whole-of-society’ approach to protecting U.S. cybersecurity.”
Upon reading this story, I was worried that the FBI had (and courts were authorizing use of) a tool that can break in and control random Windows PCs. While I wouldn’t put it past the FBI these days, the Forbes story left out one important technical detail:
After researchers found out that thousands of infected machines reported to one specific IP address, they managed to seize control over the IP address that served as a Command & Control (C2) server.
In close cooperation with the French authorities, the FBI and Justice Department used this IP address to “sinkhole” the botnet. Sinkholing in this context means that the redirection of traffic from its original destination to one specified by the sinkhole owners. The altered destination is known as the sinkhole.
With control of the sinkhole, a specially configured DNS server can simply route the requests of the bots to a fake C2 server. This provides the controller of the sinkhole with valuable information about the affected systems and an opportunity to send commands to delete the PlugX version from the connecting devices.
OK, that means the FBI only seized control of one specific computer that was already compromised by the exploit. That doesn’t mean the FBI doesn’t have a turnkey computer intrusion tool (logical fallacy alert), but it does mean they didn’t necessarily use such a tool here rather than a single white hat hacking instance to seize control of a single already-compromised PC.
Still, it’s always good to check that your security tools and settings have been updated to catch the latest malware and exploits, foreign or domestic…
If you look at some of the key ills plaguing America over the last ten years, Facebook has certainly had a hand in perpetuating some of them. Wokeness, censorship, echo chambers, commodification of user information and spam are just some of the evils Facebook (AKA Meta) has helped inflict on the citizenry.
Now Facebook is inflicting AI-generated profiles on its users.
Kneon: “Facebook is experimenting with AI generated profiles on Facebook and Instagram.”
K: “it’s going to be pretty scary because I mean you already don’t know who you’re dealing with on the internet, and I’ve heard some pretty convincing or seen some pretty convincing video. They actually had uh one of the uh AI video generators doing like an influencer video for Tik Tok and you couldn’t tell it wasn’t a real person.” If you’re doing influencer videos on Tik-Tok, I’m already halfway convinced you’re not a real person…
K: “It’s going to make it a lot harder to tell who you’re dealing with on the internet.”
Is one of the profiles woke? Of course it is. Geeky Sparkles: “‘Proud black queer mama of two, truth teller.’ It’s a truth teller, but it’s an AI, so it’s already not real but it’s going to tell you the truth. ‘Your realest source for life’s ups and downs.’ Uh, but it’s not real, it’s an AI who doesn’t know about life’s up and ups and downs, but you know it’s a black queer, it identifies as ‘a black queer mama.'”
K: “Their parent company Meta company is rolling out a wide array of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook.”
GS: “Why? Why do you need an AI character?” Why indeed?
K: “From someone who worked in marketing for years, and as a business owner, we have had some interesting things happen with Facebook advertising, and I don’t think all your money is going to ads being seen by real people.”
GS: “If advertisers are upset, and bots are a problem and bots and fake accounts are a problem because advertisers are getting scammed, they feel like they’re getting scammed and it’s an issue and we have to stop bots, why would flooding the market with generative AI characters and make your own make sense?”
K: “Meta hopes to attract a younger audience in a face off with competitors like Tik Tok and Snapchat.” First, why would Meta think younger users are all like “Hey, you know what I love? Fake profiles!” Second, if you’re taking your cues from Tik-Tok and Snapchat, you’ve already lost.
GS: “It’s hard to be a Tik tocker and make content all the time, or it’s hard to have enough content to keep going, but these AI can generate it indefinitely, so we’ll just tell people on Tik Tok to buy your shit.”
Maybe the goal is to create Ai influencers who pimp one company’s product and slam competitors.
Or create fake women on OnlyFans to make a mint.
In fact, there are already AI influencers earning money.
GS: “They’re talking about the Dead Internet Theory. And Dead Internet Theory, for those who don’t know is [basically] more and more accounts and activity on the internet are done by computers and fake people than real people.”
K: “Facebook feels dead now. Like endstage MySpace.”
In the wake of these revelations, there are conflicting accounts in different MSM sources as to whether Facebook has shut these accounts down or not.
Maybe different MSM writers are talking to different AI bot pretending to be “inside sources.” Or maybe the MSM “writers” are bots as well.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m sure a lot is advertiser driven, but I wonder if some of the investment boom in AI is coming from lefty executives watching the collapse of their systemic preference falsifaction falling away due to events like Trump’s election (all of them) and Brexit and thinking to themselves “Shit, we need to fool the rubes even harder” by using social justice bots to give The Narrative the illusion of popularity.
Fortunately for us, I think it’s too late for them to pull it off. Maybe Bluesky could finally surpass Twitter/X in user base, if we ignore that 98% of them are bots…
But still, caution seems to be in order. More than ever, everything you see online should be treated with a degree of skepticism, even if you agree with it.
I’ve previously talked about China’s difficulties in catching up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing here, here, and here, among other places. To summarize: Western nations have an advanced, highly interconnected semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem that China doesn’t have the technical expertise to replicate. In particular, China has nothing like ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (AKA a “stepper”) necessary to build the most advanced chips with the smallest feature geometries.
Though advancements that SMIC and Huawei have made in the semiconductor sector in recent years are pretty impressive, the companies are 10 to 15 years behind industry giants like Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, said Christophe Fouquet, chief executive of toolmaker ASML. It’s well known that even with the best-in-class DUV tools, Chinese fab SMIC will be unable to match TSMC’s process technologies cost-effectively. This is because Chinese companies cannot access leading-edge EUV lithography tools.
“By banning the export of EUV, China will lag 10 to 15 years behind the West,” said Christophe Fouquet in an interview with NRC (machine translated). “That really has an effect.”
ASML has never shipped its EUV tools to China due to the Wassenaar Arrangement, despite SMIC’s reported order for one EUV machine. The details remain unclear, but ASML did not deliver the machine to the Chinese foundry due to US sanctions. However, ASML kept shipping advanced DUV lithography tools, such as the Twinscan NXT:2000i, which are capable of producing chips on 5nm and 7nm-class process technologies.
As a result, SMIC has been producing chips for Huawei using its 1st-generation and 2nd-generation 7nm-class process technology for years now. This has certainly helped the Chinese high-tech giants weather U.S. government sanctions.
Having understood that EUV tools are not coming to China, Huawei and its partners have explored extreme ultraviolet lithography themselves with the aim of building their own lithography chipmaking tools and ecosystem, which will take 10 – 15 years at best. For reference, it has taken over 20 years for ASML and its partners from foundational work to complete commercial machines to build the EUV ecosystem.
China thought it had found a way out of the western ban on high end lithography machines. Turns out: Not so much.
“In the past two years, China has spent a staggering 8 billion euros to procure fewer than 120 Advanced immersion DUV lithography machines from Dutch company ASML.” DUV (Deep Ultraviolet) was the generation of machines before EUV, and can’t effectively pattern features of less than 10nm.
“On the surface this seemed like a bold and extravagant move. However, as of September 7th, the reality has turned into a bitter irony. Maintenance and upgrades for these machines are now completely restricted. In other words, starting next year these state-of-the-art [not quite – LP] lithography machines could become little more than scrap. To make matters worse, even repairs for older equipment are off the table.”
“Lithography machines are the backbone of semiconductor manufacturing, etching intricate circuits onto silicon wafers. Without proper maintenance and upgrades, these machines, worth tens of millions of euros each, will gradually deteriorate into expensive junk. Producing advanced chips smaller than 14 nanometers will become nearly impossible. Yield rates will plummet and costs will skyrocket.”
“Even TSMC, a global benchmark, requires ASML engineers to be stationed on site for regular recalibrations every 3 to 6 months. Earlier this year, an earthquake in Taiwan caused TSMC’s lithography operations to halt, and it took a month of recalibrations to resume lithography.” Requalification is indeed a huge pain in the ass.
“Machine maintenance depends on ASML proprietary components, software and technical support. Hiring a few engineers, or even the CEO of ASML, won’t solve the fundamental complexities of this highly specialized system. China’s attempts to rely on sheer manpower to bridge this gap are wishful thinking.”
“Thinking a few engineers could crack this technology is simply laughable. Lithography machines are just the tip of the iceberg in the complex semiconductor manufacturing supply chain.”
“China owns nearly 1,400 ASML lithography machines. With Western restrictions on maintenance spare parts and engineering services, these multi-million euro machines have been reduced to a rob Peter to pay Paul situation keeping them operational for just one more day at a time. Chip production is bound to shrink, creating a vicious cycle.”
“New sanctions implemented in September have blocked sales of models like the NXT1970i, shutting down access to both hardware and technology. At best, China’s capabilities remain stuck at the level of ASML’s older NXT 1470 machines, which date back to the early 2000s.”
“China’s so-called domestic lithography machines are limited to 65 nanometer dry DUV technology, with some reports claiming they can reach 55 nanometer. However, this is equivalent to ASML 2006-era technology, putting China 18 years behind. Worse, key components for these domestic machines still rely on suppliers from Japan and Germany.”
“China’s domestic lithography machines are largely a symbolic effort, more about saving face than actual technological advancement.”
There’s no way China can catch up to ASML in EUV lithography, and no way they can eliminate their deep dependence on western semiconductor manufacturing technology.
“Cutting edge EUV systems have been banned from China since 2019. Last June, high-end immersion DUV machines were added to the list. Now even older models like the NXT 1970i and 1980i can’t be sold or upgraded. China’s ambitions have been crushed, reducing it to square one.”
“This February, the Dutch Minister of Trade openly stated that China uses foreign high tech knowledge to advance its military capabilities, and ASML tools could produce sophisticated weapons. Handing over lithography machines to China is akin to arming an adversary, a move unacceptable on any strategic level.”
Without western technology, China’s desire for a technologically advanced semiconductor industry are dead in the water.
“The myth of China’s technological rise is unraveling and heading toward decline.”
When you buy a piece of high-end semiconductor equipment, you’re not just buying the machine, you’re buying the knowledgebase of deep technical expertise of both the on-site technical staff, as well as the process wizards back in Eindhoven, Santa Clara and Tokyo. There are inumerable parameters that need to be just right, and you need to know how to tweak them if the yield goes south. Without that expertise to guide you, the high end machines quickly become worthless.
I can imagine President Trump offering China a grand bargain, in which they stop stealing western technology, stop committing genocide against the Uighers, stop clashing with Philippine ships in the South China Sea, meet its treaty obligations regarding Hong Kong, and let international agencies inspects its high level bioweapon labs in exchange for easing semiconductor sanctions.
I doubt China would take such a deal, as it would be too humiliating for Xi to stand. But I can imagine Trump making it…
The Biden Administration isn’t yet done, and still more of it’s dirty dealings are coming to light. Remember Operation Choke Point, the semi-secret program to “debank” disfavored businesses like guns and weed under the Obama administration? Well say hello to Operation Choke Point 2.0, where the disfavored people being unbanked are the Obama/Biden Machine’s political opponents.
Investor Marc Andreessen made headlines last week when he told Joe Rogan that dozens of tech founders had been quietly “debanked” under the Biden administration.
Elon Musk commented on a shorter clip and asked: “Did you know that 30 tech founders were secretly debanked?”
Andreessen called the orchestrated effort “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” in reference to an Obama-era initiative targeting the gun industry which triggered anti-boycott laws in some red states.
“Debanking is when you, as either a person or your company, are literally kicked out of the banking system,” he explained. “Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a ‘politically exposed person,’ PEP. And if you are a PEP, [banks] are required by financial regulators to kick them off, to kick them out of your bank. You’re not allowed to have them.”
“Basically, it’s a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran, just kick you out of the financial system,” he said. “So this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years.”
“So when Trump says the deep state, the way we would describe it is administrative power,” Andreessen said. “It’s political power being administered, not through legislation. There’s no defined law that covers this, it’s not through regulation. There’s nothing you can do — you can’t go sue a regulator to fix this. It’s not through any kind of court judgment. It’s just raw power. It’s just raw administrative power. It’s the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way, and then they just apply pressure until they get it.”
Sounds deeply illegal, unconstitutional, and un-American, doesn’t it?
Here’s the video:
One person Andreessen mentions as being debanked is David Horowitz of FrontPage and the Freedom Center.
“You literally can’t get a bank account. You can’t get a Visa terminal. You can’t process transactions. You can’t do payroll. You can’t do direct deposit. You can’t get insurance.”
“Choke Point 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups, and it’s hit the tech world hard. We’ve had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years.” But lunatic tech/crypto founders like Sam Bankman-Fried get left alone despite breaking the rules because they donate to Democrats.
“This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It’s like we just can’t live in this world. We can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal thing, and then they literally get sanctioned.”
Here’s more of that interview with Andreessen, in which he says that the censorship regime against the enemies of the left/deep state was “widely understood.”
MA: “There’s nothing that happened at Twitter in the Twitter files that wasn’t happening to the all the other companies.”
MA: “It’s a consistent pattern. If you got the YouTube files, they would look exactly the same.”
MA: “The Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens, which I think is just flatly illegal. I think it’s actually subject to criminal charges.” That would be willful denial of rights under the color of law.
MA: “There were also members of Congress doing the same thing, which is also illegal.”
MA: “Then there was a lot of funding of outside third party groups that were that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship.”
MA: “There’s a unit at Stanford, you know, right next door. The internet censorship unit that was funded by the US government [that] exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor, and it was very effective.”
JR: “One of the things that I found really kind of shocking was when they revealed how much money the Democrats had spent on the election, and how much money was spent on activist groups. It’s like more than $100 million, right?”
MA: “There’s extensive Government funding of politically oriented NGOs. NGO is one of those great terms, right? Non-governmental organization, all right. Like what what the hell is that?”
JR: “What is that? Tell me. I don’t know.”
MA: “It’s sort of a charity. But most of the time it’s a political entity. It’s an entity with a political agenda, but then it’s funded by the government. In a very large percentage of cases, including the the NGOs in the censorship complex. Like the government grants, National Science Foundation grants, like direct State Department grants, right? Then its okay. Now you’ve got an NGO funded by the government. Well, that’s not an NGO, right? That’s a GO.”
MA: “You’ve got government officials using government money to fund what what look like private organizations that aren’t.”
MA: “What happens is the government outsources to these NGOs the things that it’s not legally allowed to do.”
JR: “Like what?”
MA: “Like censorship. Like violation of First Amendment rights. What they always say is the First Amendment only applies to the government. The First Amendment says the government cannot cannot censor American citizens. And so what they do is, if you want to censor American citizens, if you’re [what] you do is you fund an outside organization and then you have them do it.”
JR: “That’s like hiring a hitman. Like it’s not okay to murder someone, but you can hire someone to murder someone and you’re clean.”
MA: “When the government does that, [that’s] a very powerful message. Like it’s a message from a mob boss. ‘Don’t you want to do me a favor?’ ‘Yes, Mr. Gambino, I do right. I’d like my corner store not to catch on fire tonight.'”
Also this tidbit: “In her book, Melania Trump, the former first lady, claimed her bank account and that of her son Barron were shut down in the wake of the Jan 6 riots. ‘This decision appeared to be rooted in political discrimination,’ she wrote.” Ya think?
If Democrats didn’t hesitate to go after a First Lady and her son, they certainly wouldn’t hesitate to come after me or you…
The Trump witchunt trial is suspended, PA Democrats give up the steal, the ruble collapses, a real estate developer is busted for bribery, thrash metal TDS, and an unexpected voice of sanity and reason from…Cenk Uygur?
Judge Juan Merchan indefinitely postponed the sentencing hearing in President-elect Donald Trump’s New York criminal case, which had been planned for next week, in light of Trump’s election.
Merchan is giving Trump’s legal team more than a week to file its motion asking for a dismissal under the argument that his return to office provides him a new host of immunity-related defenses.
Trump’s lawyers will be required to file by December 2, after which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will have until December 9 to respond.
Snip.
While Trump could face up to four years in prison, the more likely sentence in the case — should it move forward — would be probation, which could include some combination of a fine or community service, as the former and future president is a first-time offender.
“Just as a sitting President is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as President-elect,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a letter filed Tuesday.
Trump’s team had requested a December 20 deadline to file.
Bragg, for his part, has argued in favor of freezing the case for the entirety of Trump’s term in office, and then revisiting the sentencing at the end of Trump’s tenure.
But Trump attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove have argued dismissal of the case “is necessary under the Constitution and federal law to facilitate the orderly transition of Executive power — and in the interests of justice — following President Trump’s victory in the Electoral College and the popular vote in the 2024 Presidential election.”
To paraphrase Instapundit, we’ve entered some sort of hellworld where Cenk Uygur is a voice of moderation and reason, calling out far left pollster Allan Lichtman for blowing his election call, whereupon Lichtman shrieks that Uygur is committing “blasphemy” against him. Everyone and their dog has posted this, but I’m linking to the Asmongold clip because his seems to be the shortest.
US President-elect Donald Trump’s administration is preparing to reinstate its “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran, targeting Tehran’s economic stability and its ability to support militant proxies and nuclear development, The Financial Times reported on Saturday, citing sources close to the transition team.
The sources revealed that the administration plans to impose stricter sanctions, particularly on Iran’s oil exports, which serve as a critical revenue source.
The anticipated sanctions could drastically reduce Iranian oil exports, which currently exceed 1.5 million barrels per day, up from a low of 400,000 barrels per day in 2020. Experts suggest that these measures would severely impact Iran’s economy. Bob McNally, an energy consultant and former US presidential adviser, indicated that reducing exports to a fraction of current levels would leave Iran in a far worse economic position than during Trump’s first term.
In a followup to yesterday’s story, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered state entities to divest from investments in Communist China. “One investment group specifically highlighted in Abbott’s letter is the University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), which manages billions of dollars in assets for both university systems. UTIMCO has come under scrutiny after a Texas Scorecard investigation revealed its investments in more than 50 Chinese companies.”
El Salvador’s gang prison doesn’t play around. A whole lot of this would (rightfully) be considered cruel and unusual punishment, but we should veer more in this direction rather than putting illegal alien rapists up in hotels…
Sherman Roberts, who led the City Wide Community Development Corporation, was indicted four years ago for a bribery scheme involving former Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway and former City Council Member Carolyn Davis for their support of loans and low-income housing tax credits for his apartment projects.
He now faces up to five years in prison and is expected to be sentenced in March.
Roberts paid Davis several thousand dollars in cash, and promised future payments after her council tenure ended, in return for Davis’ support of his projects — Serenity Place, Runyon Springs, and Patriot’s Crossing — according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas.
Roberts was a Democratic Party donor, but in fairly piddling amounts for a real estate developer…
The DOJ wants Google to sell off Chrome. Well, that would be a start in addressing their monopoly position in Internet searches, but would hardly be sufficient. They should also have to spin off YouTube. And because consumers were directly harmed by their monopoly, they should be required to add 2GB of storage a year for every Gmail user for 20 years, he said self-interestedly. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The time of the turning: “Sold-out NYC crowd ERUPTS, chants USA as President Trump attends UFC 309 with Elon Musk, RFK Jr, Speaker Johnson.”
Shocking news from the world of science: Weed isn’t good for you. “According to their findings, exposure to cannabis was associated with a range of cancers – breast, pancreatic, liver, thyroid, testicular and lymphoma – that also develop quickly and are more aggressive.”
Sweden’s Gender Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg is deeply afraid of…bananas.
What a freaking epic (and tiring) week! I waited until Fox and Decision Desk had declared Trump the winner past 1 AM Wednesday morning, and then had to get up a few hours later to get ready to work. So we’ve got more election fallout, Israel bags more terrorist scumbags, Elon Musk and Ron Paul may team up to fight government waste, Texas continues to purge wokeness from public institutions, and a song mystery is solved.
Last time around, Trump squandered his momentum. He passed the tax bill that the establishment GOP wanted, after which they didn’t need anything from him and turned to obstructing him….
Like airplanes on a runway. Trump’s approach this time around should be what he should have done last time: Shock and awe. Shut down departments, fire bureaucrats, exercise emergency powers, all so fast that the establishment’s responses are saturated. Javier Millei’s whirlwind assault in Argentina should be the model, sometimes in specifics but also in general approach. Bureaucrats move slowly; Trump should move fast.
Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion easily; do it. Also, set bureaucrats competing with each other for what funds remain. Divide and conquer.
The FBI’s files on its policing of domestic dissent should be opened up, as should the details of the NSA’s illegal domestic spying. Trump should have outsiders investigate possible (likely) prosecutorial misconduct in the January 6 prosecutions – something judges have already raised – and fire those responsible, as well as subjecting them to what other legal consequences may apply. The lesson that the deep state can’t intervene in domestic politics needs to be driven home, and the only way to do that is to ruin a lot of lives on the part of people who deserve to have their lives ruined, from the top of the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies to the bottom. Likewise those involved in social media censorship programs, “Operation Chokepoint” style economic warfare, and the like. Abuse of government power against the citizenry should be treated as a criminal matter, because it is.
Trump should also announce that the federal government is waiving qualified immunity on the part of such officials.
There are lots more ideas – you can submit your own in the comments below, and the much-maligned Project 2025, though not actually a Trump initiative, contains some – and Bloomberg is already warning that if elected Trump will dismantle the White House’s gun control ministry. Oh no!
The specifics aren’t really the point here, though I should probably post another essay just about those. But the point here is rapid action across a wide variety of fronts. Trump should take advantage of the precedents that Biden has set for far-reaching executive action, though you can bet that when he does the press will pretend this is the first time anything like that has ever been done.
The story of how Harris pocketed record sums while failing to gain support from voters will be studied by campaigns for decades to come. Democrats who successfully pressured octogenarian President Joe Biden to pass the torch to the former California senator are now conducting an internal autopsy of the 2024 race, in which Trump raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars less than Harris.
“A billion dollars paled in comparison to the increased prices Americans were seeing across the country,” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch and a longtime Trump ally, told the Washington Examiner. “Voters weren’t fooled.”
The Harris campaign and its affiliated committees dropped more than $654 million on advertising from July 22 to Election Day, whereas Trump spent $378 million, or 57% less, in the same category, according to data from AdImpact.
Future Forward, the $500 million “ad-testing factory” and super PAC that supported Harris, was a reliable clearinghouse for checks from wealthy Democrats such as Reid Hoffman, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Dustin Moskovitz. And anonymous donations, or so-called “dark money,” also benefited Harris at a faster and more substantial clip than Trump thanks to lax federal laws that progressives often criticize but, nonetheless, exploited in 2024.
The Harris campaign declined to comment on its finances. A fuller portrait will be public after the election, as the Federal Election Commission mandates post-general election reports for candidates within 30 days.
In mid-October, the Harris campaign disclosed that it had spent over $880 million this election, almost $526 million greater than the roughly $354 million that the Trump campaign had disclosed spending, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of federal filings. Much of the Harris campaign’s spending was allocated for digital media advertising, polling, and travel from state to state, including to a private jet company called Advanced Aviation.
Payroll and the taxes that accompanied it accounted for $56.6 million of the Harris campaign’s spending. In comparison, the Trump campaign reported spending $9 million on payroll — employing hundreds fewer staff members.
There was also the army of political, digital, and media consultants who were paid over $12.8 million by the Harris campaign, filings show.
One vendor, Village Marketing Agency, received over $3.9 million and reportedly worked to recruit thousands of social media influencers to boost Harris online. Others that scored lucrative consulting gigs from the campaign included the likes of Precision Strategies, a Democratic-aligned marketing agency; Ethos Organizing, founded by former Ohio Democratic Party director Malik Hubbard; and the Biden-allied SKDK communications firm.
Snip.
“Event production” was also a staple spending area of the Harris campaign, which notably hosted a star-studded lineup of musicians from Lady Gaga to Katy Perry for an election eve rally.
The campaign paid more than $15 million, according to federal filings, to companies for such services.
There was $1 million for Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions on Oct. 15 in West Hollywood, California.
Winfrey, a top Harris ally, appeared at a town hall with the vice president in September and was at her final rally in Philadelphia before Election Day.
Viva Creative, a marketing agency that has touted its work with Oprah, comedian Trevor Noah, the Washington Nationals baseball team, and American Express, scooped up $1.8 million from the Harris campaign for event production from September to October. A company called Production Management One in Maryland received $1.7 million, with large payments also going to Vox Productions, Temple University, Wizard Studios North, the Park Hyatt Chicago, and other entities for event production, filings show.
Then there was Majic Productions, a Wisconsin-based company, which has worked the NBA playoffs, the Super Bowl, and at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The Harris campaign paid that company $2.3 million.
A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that the Harris campaign spent six figures on building a set for Harris’s appearance on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast with host Alex Cooper. The interview came out in October and was reportedly filmed in a hotel room in Washington, D.C.
In the end, San Francisco mayor London Breed’s recent efforts to crack down on homelessness and crime weren’t enough to save her from the wrath of voters frustrated by years of disorder and talk of a “doom loop” in the famously progressive city.
After 14 rounds through the city’s ranked-choice voting process, Breed lost decisively to Daniel Lurie, a more moderate Democrat and a wealthy heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.
Lurie was ahead from the first round, and after 14 rounds led with 56.2 percent of the vote to Breed’s 43.8 percent, according to the San Francisco Department of Elections.
With San Francisco actually restoring sanity, pretty soon Austin will be the only crazy leftwing city left in America…
“UK Conservative Party elects ‘anti-woke’ Kemi Badenoch as new leader. The UK’s Conservatives on Saturday elected Kemi Badenoch as their new leader, replacing Rishi Sunak after the party’s poor performance in July’s general election. Badenoch, a staunch “anti-woke” advocate, faces the challenge of uniting a divided party while redefining its future.”
Israel seems to be on another winning streak. Israeli Commando Raid Captures Hezbollah Naval Commander….The terrorist, identified by Lebanese media as Imad Amhaz, chief of Hezbollah’s naval operations, was picked by Israeli commandos from the town of Batroun, some 100 miles into the terrorist-held hostile territory.”
Today, the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University System pushed back against “shared governance” with woke faculty members. They voted to end 52 low-performing programs, including an LGBTQ minor.
Over the course of many months, State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) repeatedly criticized DEI courses and the LGBTQ studies minor at Texas A&M. In September 2024, a university spokesperson confirmed that they would deactivate 38 certificates and 14 minors, including the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies minor.
On November 7, the Board of Regents unanimously approved the deactivation of these programs by voice vote.
The only question is why it took so long to fight back against the woke mind virus…
Want to be infuriated? “A federal disaster relief official ordered workers to bypass the homes of Donald Trump’s supporters as they surveyed damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Daily Wire and confirmed by multiple federal employees.”
“The Grift Is Ending: ESG Fund Managers Being Told To “Keep Their Lawyers Very Close.”
Green New Boom: “Lithium-Ion Battery Recycle Plant Explodes in Missouri.”
RIPeanut. “Outrage Ensues After Beloved Rescue Squirrel Seized By NY, Euthanized.”
Speaking of sickening, you might want to skip to the next LinkSwarm entry if you don’t want to hear about horrific child abuse: “Animator Bolhem Bouchiba was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering the torture of children on live streams, paying parents to abuse their own kids.” Now he works for Disney.
Remember all that money to was supposed to flow to semiconductor companies that fabbed chips in America thanks to the CHIPS Act? Well Intel has seen exactly jack and squat from it. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger: “As we said on our [earnings] call, we are disappointed by the time it is taking to get it done: it is well over two years since the CHIPS Act passed and over that period I have invested $30 billion in U.S. manufacturing and we have seen $0 from the CHIPS grants.” What are the odds that the money has actually been raked off into the usual Democratic pockets? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Followup: “For five years, Mickey Barreto lived in Room 2565 at the storied New Yorker Hotel without paying a dime. But the free ride ended when he was not only evicted, but also charged earlier this year with a criminal scheme to claim ownership of the Midtown Manhattan hotel. Now, two doctors and prosecutors have said that he is not mentally competent to stand trial, and a judge has given him seven days to find inpatient psychiatric care.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) (Previously.)
Kotaku lays off more writers, though ultra-woke leftist Alyssa Mercante evidently left on her own. Evidently they’re down to six fulltime staffers.
Everything you know is wrong. “A new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falleti has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.”
“Democrats Admit Trump Actually Won In 2020 And Is Now Unable To Serve Third Term.” “We probably should have been more up-front about the fact that we stole the election and Biden was never president, but oh well. Hindsight is 20-20. I guess Kamala wins by default now, right?”
I had to upgrade my Mac to Sequoia (15.0.1) because I need to run Slack on it for my new job. Naturally, this broke a lot of my existing apps and made Firefox look like it forgot everything, because why start up with the profile the user was already using when you can make him panic by presenting a fresh slate to suggest you’ve lost all history, bookmarks and passwords?
Anyway, I’ve got that back, and I can blog, but fixing all the changes (including finally having to buy a new version of MS Office), and the new job are going to eat up a fair amount of my time, so expect some terse blogging this week. Which, I know, is less than ideal the week before the election. It is what it is.
Oh, and I still can’t run Slack, because it needs to validate on a browser to activate, and it says my already-updated Firefox is still too old.
Israel hits Iran, everyone wants to delete illegal aliens, Kamala loses a one-person debate, WaPo refuses to pick Kamala over Hitler, the WNBA continues to bleed cash, and Tim Walz gets his ABBA on. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Reminder: Early voting in Texas is going on now and extends through November 1st, and Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump is tonight.
A new Fox News poll shows that two-thirds of American voters favor deporting illegal aliens—a dramatic increase over the past decade.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made mass deportation a major policy promise throughout his campaign, as the open border policies of the Biden-Harris administration have allowed millions of illegal aliens to enter the U.S.
The October 2024 poll of registered voters shows that support for deportation has increased dramatically since 2015. Among nonwhite voters, 57 percent now support mass deportations, while only 33 percent said they did in 2015.
Additionally, 91 percent of Republicans now say they support deportations—a 21-point increase since 2015. Rural voters’ support has risen by 20 points, urban voters by 19 points, and men’s support increased by 16.
Democrat support for deportations has increased to 42 percent from 34 percent in 2015.
Voters were also asked if they were in favor of allowing illegal aliens who have jobs to apply for legal status. While 68 percent said they were in favor in 2015, it dropped to 58 percent in favor this year.
Another Fox News poll shows that immigration is voters’ second top issue as they head into the November election. The economy is the number one issue for 40 percent of voters, while 17 percent said immigration and 15 percent said abortion.
is out of gas. The weather is choppy, the navigation system completely unreliable, and the best guess is that you’re still short of the runway. (Oh, and the captain had a stroke while in the cockpit a few hours ago, leaving only a flight attendant as the pilot. She refuses to read the instruction manual or listen to the passengers.) Yes, it’s easy enough to spin up lovingly bespoke metaphors for how the Harris campaign is handling the late stages of the 2024 race — a race they very much could still win, I must always emphasize — but I’ll conclude this one by saying that if last night’s Kamala Harris CNN town hall (with Anderson Cooper hosting in the Philadelphia suburbs) is any indication, the plane may already be disintegrating in midair, before it even hits the ground.
You may have noticed that I’ve had a decidedly muted reaction to Harris’s other recent “serious” media interviews, whether Bret Baier at Fox News or Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, in the sense that while Harris was predictably awful in both sit-downs (almost relentlessly so), she was boring and unrevelatory in her awfulness. In other words, we learned nothing new about the depths to which she is capable of sinking performatively that we didn’t already know. They were water-treading exercises for the most part.
Last night’s CNN town hall, on the other hand, was memorably bad. This is the moment her campaign dreaded, the moment when the fundamental emptiness and inadequacy of their candidate was revealed for all the world to see without helpful edits or someone to bail her out. There Harris stood exposed — with an unpersuaded audience and a moderator in Cooper who handled his task without showing any particular solicitude for her electoral fortunes — and she withered in the spotlight. (As Dylan might have said, “Even the vice president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”) There are moments from this event — many moments, oh so terribly many of them — that will haunt Harris in retirement forever should she lose, the sorts of ghastly stammering failures destined to go into YouTube clip reels ten years later explaining “How We Got Here….”
As for myself, I found Harris’s answer to Anderson Cooper’s pointed question about the border fence to be perhaps the lowest moment of her entire public career to date, and I mean that in the specific sense that nobody who watches it — not even her fiercest partisans — will be able to come away from it with anything save a reflex-level revulsion.
I did not have Anderson Cooper cooking Kamala on my bingo card but here we are.
She’s exposed as a total hypocrite here. First the wall was racist, stupid and xenophobic but now that she needs votes she’s pandering. pic.twitter.com/ctk6nmQcvZ
“What was most remarkable about the disaster is how even CNN’s own analysts panned Harris’s performance as well, some with a palpable sense of disgust.”
Some excerpts of that:
NEW: CNN’s Scott Jennings says Kamala Harris is a “double-threat” because she can’t think on her feet and can’t answer the expected questions.
CNN has railed on Harris after her town hall event.
Next, after weeks of courting Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, Harris rejected him for Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota – the state that gave us Gov. Jesse “the body” Ventura and Saturday Night Live’s Al Franken as a U.S. Senator.
Another misstep for Harris. While Shapiro isn’t Biden, he is well known in greater Philadelphia and seems comfortable campaigning in Scranton and towns like it across the state.
It still isn’t clear if Harris rejected Shapiro because he is Jewish and supports Israel’s right to defend itself or because he is a tireless campaigner, well-received on the stump, who might show her up. Did she reject Shapiro because picking him would offend “the Squad” in Congress and endanger the electoral votes of Michigan, home to a large Muslim population? Or did she spurn the Pennsylvania governor because she didn’t want her supporters murmuring: “We should’ve run him?
Harris compounded her mistake by picking Walz, who represents the Democratic Party’s modern left wing. Walz won’t help Harris win votes in Pennsylvania; in fact, he makes it harder. She picked someone who is un-relatable everywhere, from Philadelphia’s neighborhoods to small town and rural Pennsylvania. And, he’s just plain “weird.”
It gets worse. Her message, agenda, and policies are not resonating here.
She has tried to stress that the economy is actually good – “Bidenomics is working,” she maintained. They tried charts, graphs, and “experts.” No one in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods is buying it, especially blacks and Hispanics, who are being crushed by inflation and violent crime.
So Harris pivoted to a new message: she would “fix” the economy and “fight” inflation. Her now comically repeated line about being “raised in a middle-class family” draws blank stares, laughs, or anger, even among some in her usual base.
It’s even worse in rural Pennsylvania, where Walz and “second man” Doug Emhoff tried a “real men for Kamala tour,” complete with ads and Zoom calls about why men should support her.
Then they sent “Elmer Fudd” – aka Walz – out hunting. In newly purchased hunting clothes, using the wrong rifle (plus demonstrating that he didn’t know how to load it), Walz resembled something like King Charles attending the Indianapolis 500.
Harris was against fracking – that is, before she was for it, as she now claims to be. No one in rural Pennsylvania is buying it. Her “values haven’t changed,” as she herself says. Rural Pennsylvanians know that her preferred policy would hurt the economy of northern, central and western Pennsylvania, to say nothing of the national economy and national security.
Democrats want to win Pennsylvania, of course – but they have selected the wrong candidate, through the wrong method. Harris then dug the hole deeper by picking the wrong running mate. And to top it off, they’re running on a misguided, if not delusional, platform.
“Black, Latino, and Asian Trump supporters shout down white, liberal Harris supporters in Lancaster.”
The left-wing, liberal, and Democratic narrative about former President Donald Trump being a racist is falling apart.
For years, labeling Trump as a racist was an integral part of Democrats’ political strategy. It was never really true, mind you. It was just baseless hyperbolic hysteria that was at the foundation of the Democratic political propaganda machine. They have used it against every Republican presidential candidate for the last 40 years.
They used it to brainwash, scare, and manipulate racial minorities and white liberals in the previous two presidential elections, in which Trump was the GOP nominee. They wanted to create a narrative that the only people who supported Trump were a bunch of lowly, uneducated, racist white people. It worked in 2016, and it worked in 2020. It’s not working in 2024.
The sanctimony of white, liberal Democrats is predicated on their unhinged arrogance of moral superiority involving race. The white, liberal Democrats think racial minorities cannot succeed in the United States without white, liberal Democrats saving them. The white, liberal Democrats think they are more intelligent, enlightened, and compassionate than Republicans. So, imagine their surprise when, outside the venue that hosted a town hall for Trump in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, it was black, Latino, and Asian Trump supporters shouting down Vice President Kamala Harris’s white, liberal supporters.
I witnessed, firsthand, white, liberal Harris supporters screaming that Trump is a racist and then demeaning the many black, Latino, and Asian Trump supporters holding Trump signs and wearing MAGA hats and shirts. These smug, arrogant white people were trying to tell racial minorities what was best for them. It was a sight to behold, but not one that has not become commonplace in American society. It was a reflection of just how out of touch with reality white, liberal Harris voters are.
Dominicans for Trump sign holders outside Trump town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Christopher Tremoglie)
The crowd at the town hall was diverse, with a larger-than-expected minority presence, given the tall tales of Harris supporters’ fails regarding diversity and race among Trump supporters. It was immediately noticeable upon arriving at the town hall. Those in attendance were greeted by boisterous Asian Americans waving American flags in front of Trump posters, wearing red MAGA hats, and chanting the name “Trump!”
A few hundred feet away, a group of Dominican Trump voters were cheering for the former president and shouting down anyone who dared insult the GOP nominee. They stood outside the venue holding signs that read “Dominicans for Trump” and “Boricuas for Trump.”
A Harris supporter passed the group and chastised them, asking how they could be a minority and support a racist and a bigot. A person holding a “Boricuas for Trump” sign shouted back at them, asking the white Harris supporter who they thought they were telling a Dominican who to support. The Harris supporter kept walking. Other incidents played out similarly nearby.
Later, this group gathered at a main intersection near the Lancaster Convention Center and engaged in a shouting match with a group of Harris supporters, who had gathered to protest Trump. There did not appear to be any mention of race, just two groups shouting back and forth at each other. However, again, I noticed the Harris supporters were white, and the most vocal Trump supporters were black, Latino, and Asian.
Also: “Initial GOP Early Vote Turnout in Texas Substantially Higher Than 2020 Levels.”
But don’t get cocky! “Schumer-Backed Democratic PAC Makes $5 Million Texas Ad Buy Backing Allred….Schumer’s group, Senate Majority PAC (SMP) had mostly abstained from the Texas race, playing ball in other, seemingly more competitive races like in Ohio and Montana — much to Congressman Colin Allred’s (D-TX-32) chagrin. But clearly the calculus has changed for the group, which has now put substantial skin in the game in Texas.”
The Democratic Party’s election dirty tricks begin. “Montana Dem Operative Caught Tampering With Ballot Box…The operative, Laszlo Gendler, has been paid by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), according to OpenSecrets.org, as Montana Talks reported. The DSCC is attempting to help incumbent Democrat Senator Jon Tester against GOP senatorial candidate Tim Sheehy.”
A decade and a quarter of a billion dollars later, students and faculty are more frustrated than ever….
A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.
Michigan inaugurated what it now calls D.E.I. 1.0, it intentionally placed itself in the vanguard of a revolution then reshaping American higher education. Around the country, college administrators were rapidly expanding D.E.I., convinced that such programs would help attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty.
Today that revolution is under withering attack. Energized by backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and the right-wing campaign against “critical race theory” in public institutions, at least a dozen states have banned or limited D.E.I. programs at public universities. After the Oct. 7 attacks, as campuses across the country erupted with protests against Israel, critics accused D.E.I. programs of fostering antisemitism. In the fever of the 2024 campaign, Republican influencers and politicians have recast D.E.I. as an all-purpose boogeyman — the root cause of defective airplanes, the collapse of a Baltimore bridge and the near-assassination of Donald J. Trump.
But even some of Michigan’s peer institutions have soured on aspects of D.E.I. Last spring, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences said they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity; such “compelled statements,” M.I.T.’s president said, “impinge on freedom of expression.”
Michigan hasn’t joined the retreat. Instead, it has redoubled its efforts, testing the future of an embattled ideal. A year ago, the university inaugurated what it calls D.E.I. 2.0. At Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, the number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles increased by 70 percent, reaching 241, according to figures compiled by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university’s Flint campus and a D.E.I. critic. (The school’s own figures, which count the D.E.I. work force differently, show less growth over time and a much smaller staff as of last year.) When school began in August, brightly colored flags around campus promoted the goals of D.E.I. 2.0.
According to a confidential report I obtained, a committee appointed by Michigan’s provost — and stocked with professors with D.E.I.-related appointments — urged the school this summer to continue using diversity statements in hiring and promotion, arguing that eliminating them “would be seen as a capitulation to the winds of political expediency.”
In many respects, Michigan’s entire D.E.I. initiative can be understood as a sustained act of defiance against such pressures. Nearly two decades ago, voters in Michigan banned racial preferences in university admissions and hiring. When the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action across the land last year — stripping selective colleges of their most powerful tool for building racially diverse classes — Michigan’s president, Santa J. Ono, went on PBS’s “NewsHour” to offer his university as the model for achieving diversity in a post-affirmative action world.
But over months of reporting this year, I found a different kind of backlash building, one that emanated not from Washington or right-wing think tanks but from inside the university’s own dorms and faculty lounges. On Michigan’s largely left-leaning campus, few of the people I met questioned the broad ideals of diversity or social justice. Yet the most common attitude I encountered about D.E.I. during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain.
D.E.I. at Michigan is rooted in a struggle for racial integration that began more than a half-century ago, but many Black students today regard the school’s expansive program as a well-meaning failure. The university now has a greater proportion of Hispanic, Asian and first-generation students and a more racially diverse staff. But in a state where 14 percent of residents are Black, the school’s Black undergraduate enrollment has long hovered stubbornly at around 4 percent, before ticking up just past 5 percent this fall. (The figures are slightly higher if, as school officials strongly urged, you include students who identify as more than one race.) …
Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.
Social Justice is racist garbage that destroys everything it touches.
'We must not publish a study that says we're harming children because people who say we're harming children will use the study as evidence that we're harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.' pic.twitter.com/hS4CcswkXg
Hezbollah launches a drone attack against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house, though they cause no injuries. Honestly, this is a huge step up from their usual targeting of women and children, as a country’s political leaders are a legitimate war target.
“Half of Millennials and Gen Z homeowners are, quote, trapped in their starter homes, which are now losing tens of thousands in value thanks to the same Federal Reserve that put them in a housing hell to begin with.”
Ammo.com sent over a report on defensive gun use in the U.S. “Although many dispute the plausibility of more than one million DGUs yearly, it is entirely plausible. With millions of gun owners in the U.S. and millions of unreported crimes, more civilians likely stop threats than are harmed by them. Furthermore, states with permitless carry and stand-your-ground laws experience reduced violent crime rates. Therefore, armed civilians are, at least, not a danger to society.”
Another one. “North Texas Teacher Arrested for Sexual Relationship With Former Student. Carroll ISD middle school teacher Angela Barnes was charged with sexual assault of a child and improper relationship between an educator and student.”
Lin Chen pleaded guilty in federal court today to illegally exporting U.S. technology to a prohibited end user in China, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). The plea was accepted by the Hon. William Alsup, Senior U.S. District Judge.
In pleading guilty, Chen, 65, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), admitted to acting on behalf of Jiangsu Hantang International Trade Group Corp., Ltd. (JHI), a company headquartered in Nanjing, PRC, to procure a wafer cutting machine on behalf of Chengdu GaStone Technology Co., Ltd. (GaStone), an entity located in Chengdu, PRC. Chen admitted to knowing that GaStone was designated on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List on Aug. 1, 2014. Federal regulations restrict the export of certain items to companies, research institutions, and other entities identified on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List. Under applicable Department of Commerce regulations, wafer cutting machines, which are used to cut thin semiconductors used in electronics (also known as silicon wafers), require a license for export to end-users such as GaStone.
According to the plea agreement, by no later than Dec. 4, 2015, Chen knew that GaStone was prohibited from receiving restricted exports without a license, including a DTX-150 Scribe and Break Machine, a machine for processing silicon wafer microchips. On approximately Dec. 10, 2015, Chen worked with a co-defendant to arrange the sale of a DTX-150 to GaStone by shipping it to the PRC in the name of JHI without an export license from Commerce. Chen used JHI’s status as an intermediary to conceal GaStone as the true end-user of the technology.
That’s a slice-and-dice machine, not some cutting-edge process tech that’s embargoed to China. They might have been able to get that legally by just filling out the proper forms.
The last full-sized Kmart closes. I would say “Thanks, Joe Biden,” but this particular death, thanks to Walmart and Amazon, has been a long time coming.
“WNBA will lose $40 million this season. So naturally the players are thinking of opting out of their labor agreement to ask for more money… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Postcards From Barsoom has an extensive, reasonably compelling case that men gravitate toward jobs that allow them to compete with other men, mainly to impress women, and as become the majority in each of these fields, those particular arenas no longer convey status for achievement, because men do not win status by defeating women. Thus men who enter female-dominated fields for greater access to women are barking up the wrong tree, because even their co-workers will view them as low status. This theory has a certain amount of explanatory power, and posits that the feminization of academia begat social justice, not vice versa, but seems to me to be too totalizing an explanation for our current woes. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
“Rather than being a point and shoot offensive weapon, Leonidas is meant to provide defensive area coverage, creating less a contiguous force field in the surrounding area and more an area of denial where no unfriendly drone system can operate.”
“The core of the Leonidas system is its use of high power microwave energy fired in beams that create an electromagnetic pulse or EMP.”
“EMPs are nothing new in modern warfare, and their effects are well known, primarily their ability to disable electronic systems.”
“But rather than, say, the natural EMPs that come from lightning strikes, or the uncontrolled EMPs that result from the detonation of nuclear weapons, the EMPs that come from the Leonidas system are able to be channeled precisely.”
“Cutting in a wide beam, they can fry anything in their path neutralizing say an oncoming drone swarm all at once, orthey can focus on precise individual targets, sniping drones out of the sky one by one as soon as they violate perimeters.”
“Using specialized transistors rather than traditional magnetrons to generate its microwave beam, Leonidas is considered more compact than would otherwise be expected for a weapon of this kind, and at a relatively low cost of energy expenditure.”
“It can focus a beam for a relatively long duration of time, or fire off shots in Rapid succession relying on a digitally beamformed antenna that beam is kept tight and highly precise, such that it’s unlikely that nearby friendly drones will be impacted when the beam is targeted against a single foe.”
“Leonidas can fire very rapidly without overheating, and its effect on a target is near instantaneous, rather than needing to train the beam on the target for any length of time. It doesn’t require reloading, and its voltage is low enough that humans nearby aren’t in danger from its emissions.” All of this sounds almost too good to be true.
“It’s efficient, it’s easily transported, and by all indications it’s highly effective against the consumer grade drone technology that the US military is so worried about. Any drone of that sort that comes into Leonidas’s protective bubble will be fried, regardless of the specific internal electronics.”
It too can fit on a Stryker. It can also fit in the back of a pickup truck “without too much trouble.”
“The system has been adapted into an aerial attachment pot, giving it the option to be fitted onto a heavy lift drone of its own and defend in midair.”
“It’s just as successful in stopping fully autonomous drones that don’t require active operator control in order to function.”
Can also take out sea drones.
Designed to be modular and upgradeable.
“The ground-based version is ready for testing. In January of 2023, the U.S. cut the Epirus corporation a check for $66 million after it beat out six different competitors, with the expectation that the check would be used to develop four prototypes as soon as possible. 14 months later, all four prototypes have been delivered and for about half a year now, they’ve been in the hands of the US government.” Some are reportedly being tested in the middle east.
Called Indirect Fire Protection Capability (IFPC) Increment 2, the U.S. program will include a range of technologies—guided-missile interceptors, high-energy lasers and high-power microwave blasters—to shoot down multiple threats and provide a layered defense against weapons such as drone swarms. Each of these technologies is already in development and being readied for troops over the next two years.
IFPC’s high-power microwave component should be ready for operational use as soon as next summer. In January the Army tapped a Los Angeles–based company called Epirus to build four prototype microwave systems as one layer of its planned IFPC. These prototypes are versions of Epirus’s Leonidas system. Each one sits on a wheeled trailer that can be detached for remote operation and has a square panel that rests on a gimbal so it can pivot 360 degrees. This panel is packed with software-controlled radio frequency amplifiers that tailor the energy and frequency of the microwave blast.
“The Leonidas design incorporates a lot of lessons identified coming out of Ukraine and a lot of forecasting into what we think a fight in the Western Pacific might look like,” says Aaron Barruga, vice president of federal growth at Epirus.
Leonidas’ HPM prototype passed muster with Army evaluators in early November, and testing is underway as the Army develops tactics, techniques and procedures for the system’s operational use. The goal is to put the four prototype high-power microwave weapons into the hands of operationally deployed units—possibly in the Middle East—next summer.
All of this sounds a bit too good to be true. Designing microwave ICs means dealing with mixed signal and analog design, and analog is something of a dark art. RF engineers are in high demand and pricey when you find them. Various microwave weapons have been announced over the years, and none seem to have made it to volume production.
